Thoughts, comments, suggestions on Mary Piper in Ptolemaic universe....
I liked it, Steph and the dagger were just misunderstood :P, Not that Nik is into weapons or cool stuff, would have been nice he opened more good boxes.
The dagger was not evil, in and of itself, just a nifty little tech weapon. And there were those unenergized particle blasters.
Steph probably read Narnia, and thought the White Witch was a role model.
I like it. It was a surreal world. I keep wondering what would have happened if we had steered for Jupiter. Since Space was breathable, maybe Jupiter would have been inhabitable. Things were totally different there.
I do have the feeling that it was a stall world. I was looking forward to providing for ourselves through the crates for enough time to land on earth or something.
Well, a bit sad that I only lasted a day there.
I'm also curious what the metal crawling creature was.
You were on the outermost crystal sphere, and Jupiter is on a closer crystal sphere so you'd have to find a way from one sphere to another. And, in this way, it was a stall, for there was no way for you to get to the next 'staircase' down before you ran out of food.
The metal crawling creature was another bad GE roll. Its was, as you suspected, a spider that eats rope, or in this case sail and eventually wood. It would have ate the ship to provide parachutes for its offspring.
That would have been interesting. Spider hunt!