Murgh
- This page is about the metaphorical humanoid personage, Murgh the Munificent. For the ordinary human OXPer and wiki admin, (Old) Murgh, see User:Murgh
Murgh was an oldtimer humanoid from the first wave of the Oolite era, who briefly showed traits of intense and profligate industry, before he suddenly vanished into the soupy fog of a distant nebula.
Contents
Origins
In his naïve youth he felt wasted working on the factory floor of the GenFun Pabulum™ assembly line, when made aware of the ground breaking work of the industrial artist Aegidian to whom he instantly sought to ingratiate himself with.
In spite of the avalanche of fan mail thrust upon the modern master, a simple design for a pin striped medical ship variant caught his eye, and the door was opened ajar. In time, the young Murgh would realise that this design saved him from an existence of complete obscurity. As fortune continued to smile upon young Murgh, Aegidian saw beyond the excessive exuberance of the young sycophant, and instead took notice of his sickly cute shaping of the latest genetic modifications of the Trumble menace. At last he was whisked away from his miserable conditions and given a shot at the big time, granted the means to try his hand at material construction in a wide areas of fields. A brief but chaotic reign running the Murgh Shipyards saw the construction of several ships and stations, as well as running a space-taxi service and an advertising firm on the side, with varying success.
Station constructions
Irresponsibly toying with implementing alternate shapes to the classic cuboctahedral Coriolis, the Dodecahedron and the Icosahedron, Murgh found funding to go ahead with the construction of a beveled octahedron B2 prototype at Diso. As the money and enthusiasm dissipated, no further such stations were ever built.
Consumed by egocentricity, Murgh's only response to this failure was to steam forward in a yet grander scale. The Globe station was promptly constructed, but also this project failed to capture the imagination of the public. Possibly due to the station bearing little distinguishable difference to a common planetary body, no further stations were ordered. A huge financial blow to Murgh Industries, spiteful tongues have for unknown reasons referred to the Globe station as a "death star".
Deep in a funk following repeated failure, Murgh happened upon a rare stroke of genius with the construction of the Torus station. Drawing inspiration from ancient cinema of unknown origin, this station was impressive to behold, but its true brilliance was found in the inexpensive nature of construction. Small modular pods were fabricated separately and programmed to auto-join, making the assembly phase the cheapest and safest station construction in the business.
The triumph was short-lived however, as the Tori proved even easier to disassemble. Seeing a Torus station, suddenly at just the slight kiss of a collision, disintegrate into its constituent building blocks like shattering glass is an unforgettably stupefying sight to behold. Had the construction been populated as intended, the number of casualties would have been massive, and the event would have gone down as among the most severe peace-time disasters in history. It was young Murgh's incredible luck that this was not the case.
Nevertheless, such a fail of majestic proportions would easily have ended any promising career. The money people quickly looked to salvage their interests, and whisked away the young engineer under the carpet and to consolidate their assets. Upon foreclosure of Murgh Industries, other companies end more skilled engineers amended these issues, and the design eventually came to be seen in select planetary systems.
Advertising
Already proven inclined to opt for profit while untroubled by conscience, the lure of the advertising racked proved irresistible to the young Murgh. Before the construction of a sizeable a fleet of advertising droidships was even finished, the newly formed promotion agency Murgh PR had landed contracts from a wide array of fields, ranging from the arms industry to the most questionable of all health sectors, the fungal cure alternative medicine.
Public announcement campaigns on behalf of the GalCop police authority were initially cause for optimism, and after wooing Hatchling CEO Ludo Van Der Budenmayer, Murgh PR secured the campaign to launch the highly anticipated luxury speed ship BoyRacer, which in resulted in euphoria, though prematurely. The joy quickly transformed to dread with the subsequent scandal in the wake of numerous tragic accidents as BoyRacers were revealed to come equipped with subpar automated steering. The unusually gruesome nature of these accidents made the affair a PR nightmare, leaving even PR firms such as Murgh's with no favourable solutions. The lineup of wealthy plaintiff ensured the demise of Hatchling, and Murgh PR was nearly caught in the wave of bankruptcies that ensued.
Though pulling in some revenue for a limited time, the Murgh ad firm was tainted. At advertisement awards ceremonies, the firm garnered precisely zero awards, and in an industry so dependent on laurels and the steady flow of fumes up one's rear by one's peers and rivals, the days of this venture, too, was numbered.
Advert hall of shame
Ship construction
Nascent career
Despite all his side gigs, Murgh yearned the most to be viewed as a respected shipbuilder, to become a personage first and foremost associated with the vessels that make possible the noble act of interstellar navigation, the finest starcraft, synonymous with safety, innovation and style. With his personal taste for slab-headed, brutalist design which had briefly been in vogue, the feeling was that this was a field where young Murgh had serious opportunities. As with many such dreams, these were not anchored in reality.
Beacons
Murgh first dared to dream when the benevolent Aegidian suggested he turn his hand on building something useful, rather than designing hypercopulating vermin. Given access to the tools of the inner circles of real industry, Murgh became elated when the venerable one appeared favourable to a suggestion of a new concept, to place a series of beacons at the witchspace convergence point.
Mirthful, Murgh presented the elder with his blueprint for such a beacon, daring to dream that this time too, perhaps, his design would be chosen. It was not however, a different path was chosen. But instead being completely gutted and deciding to quit it all, Murgh found in himself an auspicious sense of optimism, a path to further hone his building skills, and one day maybe, he would make something of himself.
Monuments
Early on in the efforts of honing his abilities, the young Murgh responded to a commission for a spiritual memorial stone to contribute to the long-neglected Tionisla Orbital Graveyard, whose foundation trust had recently come into some much-needed funds. Of course, he would be delighted to submit sculptures for this project.
With aplomb, Murgh sculpted an homage to the most ancient of navigators, the deadest of the dead, and submitted the work to the esteemed body of selectors. It was received with little comment, though it was remarked that the sculpture appeared to lack ears. It was nevertheless admitted to the body of monuments.
Murgh outstayed his welcome, however, with unreasonable demands that the monument be given eternal spotlights, and the relationship with the TOGY board soon grew cold. The board had the last laugh, as the monument to date appears to orbit in perpetual obscurity.
Some years later it became evident that this ill will was not forgotten, when Murgh approached the TOGY foundation with a proposal to populate the stellar necropolis with advertising droids, and was met with contemptuous scorn. An olive branch from Murgh PR in the form of a promotional campaign with an aim to appease did little to mend the relations, possibly due to the work suffering from spelling errors.
Shipyard years
At long last, the young Murgh had some funds and as well as some investor confidence to establish his own construction facility. Murgh Shipyards was born. Casting his net again perhaps too widely, he began construction of ships of his own somewhat radical designs, while simultaneously recreating a series of designs once thought lost to posterity, and being of a mind never to waste perfectly useable material, he also set up a subdivision dedicated to restore derelict wrecks to adequate requirements within a margin of safety levels. His vision was to create ships for all manner of creatures, all manner of credit rating.
The rollout of the Heirloom series, the range of ships past their prime renovated to quite near spaceworthy standards, was a decisive success, in no small part aided by an aggressive advertisement campaign by Murgh PR. There was a niche in the market for implausibly cheap spacecraft, and plenty of spacefarers so desperate for interstellar mobility that they would disregard a moderate element of death hazard. Furthermore, to trade in one's newer spacecraft in order to claim the credit balance and then invest in other expensive equipment soon came into vogue, and having predicted this, Murgh was prematurely declared a genius, by himself. A run of good fortune followed, but predictably, it would end.
Proving that there was absolutely nothing he wouldn't do, Murgh tried to touch upon every genre of space craft. From appealing to the young, distastefully wealthy aggressive speed enthusiasts with the Hatchling BoyRacer series, to the affluent mercenary with the relaunch of the classic Wolf Mk.II design, things were off to a solid start, and remained not too controversial with the rollout of new police ship models Viper Mk.II and Viper Cruiser.
With the string launchings of the Bandy-Bandy, Taipan, Chuckwalla, Eel Rapier, and the particularly gruesome Rattle Cutter, it may have seemed the designer had started to stab in the dark, oblivious to which demographic these ships would appeal to. The rollout of the Coral and CoachWhip liners and fuel transport Woma did little for the market and with the releases of the Xpat Adders for desperate refugees, the mis-named Hognose Tugship for a towing service with no apparent market, and the low budget rude taxi service Frog, the concept department seemed all out at sea.
Attempting a turnaround of fortunes, Murgh recalled his greatest hit in the Wolf Mk.II, and began a series of re-releases of the proven classics: Bushmaster Miner, the Cat/Cougar, Chameleon, Ghavial, Iguana, Monitor, Ophidian and Salamander. Relying on these timeless designs may have extended the career of Murgh, for a while.
Always drawn to projects of massive scale, Murgh answered the call to a Navy commission, and released the supercarrier Leviathan -again with the inclusion of the rather evil Rattle Cutters-, before venturing into the gambling industry, lured by FurCorp heiress Magda DeMug, and the construction of a fleet of hOopy Casino ships. Murgh was flying high, and predictably, too high.
Having hastily expedited the launch of a search&rescue Cobra variant, Murgh showed he was perhaps fundamentally unsuited to the pressures of widespread consumer demands, and his career came to a sudden halt in the middle of the production of a new announced racing league, as shoddy work was found strewn about, dumbfounded investors left empty-handed, and the supposed creator nowhere to be found.
In the aftermath of the Racing League Scandal, Murgh's immediate withdrawal from public life seemed at first not unexpected, but as time passed, it became evident that Murgh had indeed utterly vanished and left no trace of whence to. Rumours of his final destiny circulated for a time, but as interest abated and new gossip caught the people's imagination, Murgh eventually became completely forgotten.
Obscurity and return
Decades since, accounts of a creature going by the name of Old Murgh indicate this may be the same individual having made a diametric occupational shift. Located somewhere in the Teveri system, describing himself at -first as a humble wine-wallah, or as he became older and grubbier, a whisky-wallah, trading wine and other evil juices.
Having neither self-immolated in his old shipyard's foundry, been spaced in a cargo container by a cartel of justifiably enraged investors, nor absconded with the agile kinetic movement artist Hoola Bandoola to the lagune region of Anxebiza (the bookmakers' top 3 most likely outcomes) but rather he sought to redefine himself anew on the gastro-planet Atriso, immersing himself the artisanal trades of exotic cookery, winecraft and evil juice distillation. Having left behind a world steeped in conflict and struggle, he took to this new existence of harmony and comfort like a lobster to a kettle.
Mastery of this second path of life attained, and a reputation akin to an influential sage under his false identity, Old Murgh, he had completed the reshaping of his destiny. Despite this life of pleasure and satisfaction, Old Murgh still did not feel appropriately satisfied, and came to realise that he craved the turmoil and agony of his former existence. That, and he sensed that with the latest innovations in digital taste interpretation, the Artificial Intelligence SALVOR was getting very close to making the humanoid service of his occupation an obsolete one.
Coincidental return
Destiny presented an opening, when Old Murgh's true identity was discovered by the high-profile, redoubtable bandit queen Zora Badú, who while evading the law near the suspended vineyards of Muzel, once again proved that she never forgets a face, and put to the old shipbuilder the choice between having his identity spilled to the galactic press, or assemble for her a ship so she may slip away.
Discovering that old trades are never completely forgotten, Old Murgh easily restructured from stray parts a spacecraft in the antiquated Python "Blackdog" motif, and found to his surprise that his inner passions had been stirred. It all began to come back to him.
The discovery
As destiny presented him with the time and place to look beneath the dust of past deeds, he became drawn to look at the very beginning. Upon examining the oldest blueprints and drawings, he made not one but two surprising discoveries about the foundation of the world he thought he knew.
Remarkably, he found that the archetypal models of the Asp Mk.II and the Fer-de-Lance were not within the parameters that they should have been, but rather, flexibly altered interpretations by the grand Architect Aegidian. The dimensions were extremely different! The FdL had become fat! The Asp was upside down!
At first he thought he must be wrong, "how could this be?", "there is no possible way that the founder deviated from the primordial scheme of things!". "All this time.."
But eventually, Old Murgh had to accept the fact that his discovery was indeed true.
The philosophy
Having shaken off this feeling of stupefaction, Old Murgh sensed that he needed to do something. Certainly not to "correct" the decisions of the old master who did his tremendous work at a blazing pace, but what if he set out to shape a version of the past as it could have been according to a vision of a unified philosophy, the calmness of patient reflection and the benefit of the hindsight and acquired taste of a seasoned and experienced old dog.
While not particularly drawn to the surface-level impressively luscious PROHIPy trends that had so dominated shipbuilding fashion in the years since his departure, the passé abstract RELOPy style beckoned for him to return.
For Murgh, the draw had always been the beauty of the figurative primitivism, the minimalism, the brutalism, the transient imperfection, the austerity and patina of a hauntingly beautiful slab-sided dystopic vision. He knew in his heart what he should have done decades ago but didn't, and he knew the name of the philosophy because he had always known it. It was Iron Ass.
Shipbuilding comeback
And so he set himself a fairly ambitious goal..
