Welcome to Odin III, a grubby little mining world on the dark and dusty backside of nowhere. It’s a world where everything that’s worth having is already owned by Galactic Mining, and where people come to squander their hopes and lives, working for the company and dreaming of striking it big. It’s also a world where strange, weird, and sometimes fantastic things can happen, and they all seem to center around the settlement of Odin North and a friendly little bar called Weber’s Place…
Prologue: A guy walks into a bar…
by Bruce Bethke
In which we introduce the world of The Odin Chronicles and explain just a little bit about the concept for this series and the creative team behind it.
Season One
Episode 1: “Weber’s Place” • by Pete Wood
It was supposed to be a routine flight: just a short hop to Odin II to test out a new hyperdrive. Then Ray Cornwall hit the power switch, and that’s when all the trouble began…
Episode 2: “Amid These Dancing Rocks at Once and Ever” • by Paul Celmer
Ray’s accidental changes to history continue to cascade down through the timeline, but Susan is one of the few people who somehow can still remember what her life was like before everything changed…
Episode 3: “The Song of Akinyi” • by Jonathan Sherwood
Ray relives the last flight of the Song of Akinyi, and makes a surprising discovery about what really happened in the moments before Hans became unstuck in time…
Episode 4: “The Two Fathers” • by Pete Wood
The Odin North parish priest, Father Francis, has a serious problem. The Church has decided he needs more help and sent him Father Luigi, and he’s had “help” from Luigi before. If only there was some sort of special work on Odin III that required Father Luigi’s unique blend of talents, that would take him away from town for a long, long time…
Episode 5: “Where’re You From?” • by Roxana Arama
Not everyone comes to Odin III hoping to have a good life. Some come hoping to have a bad one, and the life Florian wants to have is very bad indeed…
Episode 6: “Delayed Messages” • by Carol Scheina
One problem with being one of the furthest colonies out is that communications with Earth depend on a satellite relay system that can be very unreliable. A long-delayed message for Mine Supervisor Popov finally arrives, with surprising repercussions.
Episode 7: “Picnic” • by Pete Wood
While on a picnic up in the hills, Popov’s dog runs off and gets lost. Now it’s getting dark, and after dark is no time to be outside the settlement. In the daylight, Odin III’s native wildlife runs away from humans. After sunset, the tables are turned…
Episode 8: “A Friend for the Machinist” • by Jenna Hanchey
With Susan still missing, Daraja Mapunda, the man known as The Machinist, realizes he really needs to come up out of the tunnels more often, and perhaps even to think about making some new friends…
Episode 9: “Sloane Dreams of Being” • by Travis Burnham
While fixing the orbital satellite relay system, Repair Drone-15 is stricken by a massive solar power surge and accidentally becomes sentient. Realizing it’s disabled and going to crash, it reaches out to Daraja, but takes the name “Sloane” to hide its true nature.
Episode 10: “The Odinian Job” • by Gustavo Bondoni
It’s a tale as old as Old Earth: where there’s a mine, there’s a payroll, and where there’s a payroll, there are always a few dirtbags scheming to steal it. And no, even on Odin III, there is no honor among thieves.
(At this point in Season One we finally got the
budget to have illustrations for every story.)
Still on his mission to contact the Rock People, Father Luigi finds something amazing, but what is it? A divine miracle? An alien artifact? A working example of Clarke’s Third Law in action? Whatever it is, Galactic Mining wants it, and Luigi is beginning to suspect that that’s not a good idea.
Episode 12: “Twelve” • by Roxana Arama
A young schoolboy discovers the secret of the Rock People, but it comes at a terrible cost.
The barriers between the alternate realities are breaking down. Arthur begins to remember his life with Susan in the original timeline.
Episode 14: “Love and Groceries” • by Carol Scheina
Father Luigi and Shelley try to confront Father Francis and get him to approve of their relationship, but a malfunctioning service robot has other, more deadly ideas for all of them.
Episode 15: “No Place” • by Pete Wood
Starship crewman Jonas Gruber returns to Odin III for the first time in fifteen years, but the relativistic time dilation makes the reunion with his family and old friends very difficult.
Episode 16: “Dreams of Another World” • by Jenna Hanchey
For playwright Olivia Fontaine, exile or prison would have been better than following her husbands to their new teaching jobs here on Odin III. Constable Jenkins decides to take her in tow and show her there’s more to life on Odin III than first meets the eye.
Episode 17: “A Question of Timelines” • by Travis Burnham
Following her husband’s murder, a professional therapist flees to Odin III, where she begins to wonder whether koblyx, Odin III’s indigenous hallucinogenic mushroom, might actually have legitimate therapeutic value. Then she begins to experiment on herself…
Now that Jonas Gruber has decided to give up space travel and stay on Odin III, he’s having trouble adjusting to life as a miner. His growing addiction to koblyx isn’t helping…
Episode 19: “The One Who Walks Out” • by Carol Scheina
A mining tragedy on Odin II finally causes Father Luigi to find his true calling…
After surviving a shuttle crash on Odin II, Father Francis races against time to repair the ship’s emergency beacon and call for help, before the Odin system’s binary suns rise and the survivors bake to death.
Episode 21: “Hunt” • by Jonathan Sherwood
Never forget: in the daylight, Odin III’s native wildlife runs away from humans. After dark, the tables are turned...
On Odin III, broken tools are too valuable to be thrown away—even when a tool is as broken as the robot that tried to kill Shelley, Father Luigi, and Father Francis. Ingrid and Sloane-51 try to repair it, but it takes eleven-year-old Vivi to find the crucial missing piece—and it’s not hardware.
Episode 23: “The Disappearing Cat Trick” • by Carol Scheina
Suddenly, cats seem to be everywhere in Odin North, coming and going as they please. Daraja suspects it has something to do with the crystal apple Father Luigi found in Episode 11. What do the cats know that the humans don’t?
Episode 24: “The Ocean of Story” • by Paul Celmer
Another mystery of the Rock People comes to light, and with it, hints at a path to human immortality. But some people don’t want that secret to be found.
Episode 25: “In Triplicate” • by Gustavo Bondoni
Daraja and Constable Jenkins attempt to send the crystal apple back to Earth for further study, but find they’re facing an enemy even they can’t defeat: colonial bureaucracy.
Ida has spent her entire life helping people, whether they want her help or not. A new house and a small green beetle teach her a valuable lesson.
Episode 27: “Winds of Possibility” • by Carol Scheina
The townspeople are forced to take shelter in the mines when the worst dust storm in 50 years hits Odin North. But on Odin III, dust storms are no ordinary things…
Episode 28: “Coffee Grounds and Soap Bubbles” • by Travis Burnham
An old prospector learns a valuable lesson: like tools, friends are hard to come by on Odin III, so you’d best not throw them away, no matter how irritating they might sometimes become.
Episode 29: “The Light of Better Days” • by Jonathan Sherwood
Hans finally confronts Aisling, and reveals the secret he’s been keeping for 50 years of what really happened on the last flight of the Song of Akinyi, in the moments before he became unstuck in time.
Episode 30: “Calling” • by Pete Wood
It’s a time of endings, and new beginnings. Father Francis has been recalled to Earth, to take a teaching post. Father Luigi has finally matured, to become the parish priest Odin North needs him to be. And Aisling has one last vision…
Season Two
It’s two years later. While Luigi and Shelley are trying to move ahead with plans for their wedding, Daraja is growing concerned. The plasma barrier on the east side of town is breaking down, and the Change Wind storms are becoming more frequent. Thus far the timeline glitches have been fairly minor, but it’s only a matter of time until there’s a major break in the space/time continuum.
Episode 32: “The Song of Her Heart” • by Matt Krizan
Sloane-51, the accidentally liberated A.I., continues to evolve in unexpected ways. Her behavior is becoming more erratic, more unpredictable... more human. When a mine cave-in traps Sloane and Daraja deep underground, her “quirks” might make all the difference between life and death.
Episode 33: “An Infestation in the Mines” • by Carol Scheina
The miners have found something very disturbing down on the 500-meter level, and Popov seeks out expert help to deal with it.
Jonas Gruber draws the short straw and gets sent out to find and fix the gaps in the plasma barrier. To make things worse, his new partner doesn’t seem to know how to shut up—even when they’ve drawn the attention of a stalking night razor.
Episode 35: “A Good Boy” • by Kimberly Ann Smiley
Dr. Peyton, the town pediatrician, has a soft spot for small furry animals of all kinds. When an injured alien creature shows up on her doorstep, she takes it in and nurses it back to health—and in the process, makes a frightening discovery.
It was either the scientific find of the millennium or… Or whatever it was, it was Nina’s problem now.
Odin III took the lives of his wife and his children. He would make the whole planet remember them.
There’s been a quake and a cave-in, miners are trapped underground, and Father Luigi learns that sometimes the hardest but most useful thing to do is not to run to the scene and try to help.
Father Luigi receives a disturbing visitor with a very disturbing message.
Still wandering across the alternate timelines and searching for her one true life, Susan finds a clue in an ancient game.
Ingrid deals with the complications of relatives and relativity, while a mysterious stranger attempts to communicate with her cat.
Hans is stuck in a time loop—again—only this time he’s finding it relaxing. No surprises means no stress. There’s just one problem he can’t seem to solve…
Duncan Strasser has been acting strangely ever since the incident in the bamboo forest in Episode 34. Forced to work alone with him deep in the mines, Father Maria begins to find out just how strange he’s become.
On a world like Odin III, what’s the point of a prison? It’s just a waste of people who could be doing the work robots are too valuable to do. People like Rauno.
Since surviving the shuttle crash on Odin II in Episode 20, Mazaa has had a lot of time to think about her life and how empty it’s become, until a fire in the hangar changes everything in an instant.
Every day, life on Odin III finds a new way to be weird. Teleporting slugs? Father Luigi helps Dr. Nina cope with living on a planet where even the most basic rules of science don’t seem to apply.
After losing her arm in an accident and getting a robotic prosthesis, Eva discovers she has a special affinity for broken and discarded robots.
You know the old joke, “The last man on Earth heard footsteps behind him?” Out for a walk late at night, Shelley suddenly finds it’s not funny at all.
Ingrid, the owner of Weber’s Place and overworked bartender who never gets a night off, finally discovers the secret of how to be in two places at the same time.
The Odin Chronicles is now on vacation for the
rest of August, but will return in September.
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