Captain Francine Friction and the Trials of the Maze Planet –

Chapter 1: The Captain

Francine Friction, the youngest Captain in Earthfleet's history is adrift in space on her ship, 'the Icarus'.
She is the lone survivor of her crew after waking up from a decade long cryo-sleep on a shared mission into exploring the deep recesses of space.

She awoke to an empty ship on the brink of power failure, with no crew, a wiped mission log and no idea what had happened while she was asleep. The only clues she had were the faded scorch marks in the ships interior, dead hyperspeed engines and a slowly dying life support system.

The last remnant of her life before the Icarus was an interwoven charm bracelet that her father had given her, when she was promoted to captaincy. He had told her that in times of danger or strife, this lucky charm would protect her… a lot of good it was doing for her now though.

It had been a year since she had been awoken by a power failure caused by a passing electrical storm had awoken her from her cryo-pod.

By her calculations, the she only had 12 months of fuel, food and water left until she ran out. Although she was a genius level intellect and a cunning warrior, she had no idea how to repair the damage to her ship's engines and this far into deep space, no one had answered her distress beacon since it was sent it out over a year ago.

This left her with a lot of time to feel the full depths of despair and loneliness that came with her unfortunate situation. Fortunately, she soon discovered that in addition to the remaining life support systems, the ship's 'hollo-deck' was fully operational.

The hollo-deck can create holograms according to the preference of the user, mostly used for training simulations. However, the Captain takes to using them for not only training, but as a way to deal with the lonliness.

Growing up, Capt. Friction was a fan of late 20th and early 21st century fiction and chose to spend some of her time both watching recreations of movies, TV and games that she enjoyed.
Mostly however, she spends the majority of her days interacting with some of the fictional characters that she remembers from popular fiction.

She would train her hand to hand combat skills with two characters whose skills she had admired as a young girl – Rock Lee from the Naruto Shippuden anime series and Tommy Oliver, AKA the Green Power Ranger.

She would train herself in weapons and target practice by shooting with Halo's Masterchief, using Grunts as target practice (party headshot skulls enabled, of course!).

For other times when she sought to exercise her mind, she projected the character of Seto Kaiba from the Yu Gi Oh series and would regularly test and improve her strategy skills by dueling him in the game of duel monsters.

And then there were the other times that she was simply, well, bored.
She had always loved Shrek as a child and part of her had always wondered what it would be like to be his friend. So when she needed a good laugh and her fair share of banter, she would project the image of the lovable big green ogre.

Over time, she found herself intrigued by the idea of confronting some of the villains of fiction. She thought to herself, that if she was ever going to get out of this situation, she would have to be cunning, and use everything she had at her disposal to improve it.
She recalled reading a digital version of books by an author named Lemony Snicket; she remembered the villain being one of the most cunning manipulators that she had come across in all of fiction – Count Olaf.
She thought that if she could talk with him, study him and outwit him, it would be a good start for her to learn from him… well, parts of him.

As the fictional holographic projections (or FHP's) regularly interact with Captain Friction, their programming enables them to recognize her and start to build their own memories of events, whilst keeping their base personalities intact.

Green Ranger: Tommy Oliver and Rock Lee spend the most time with her, as she was an avid martial arts enthusiast.

Lee develops a crush on Friction because she is strong, intelligent and above all else a fantastic fighter.

Tommy however, is cool and distant to the Captain's flirtations; maintaining that he has his girlfriend Kimberly (the Pink Ranger) back in Angel Grove… although this does not really bother Friction because 1: They cannot physically exist beyond the holo-dec; and 2, Neither Kimberly nor any of them were actually real.