Food Stalls, Serving Robots and a Tram That Runs November 14, 2026

Last time the crew started keeping hours and sitting down to meals, though nobody actually ate. Now they eat. The tram on E Deck runs, and the concourse it stops at has gained a row of food stalls, served by small robots that ride a rail overhead. Two more people have come aboard, and another run of rooms is furnished.

Food stalls on the concourse

The concourse, where the tram stops, used to have white kiosks with a coloured block for the goods. The food ones are now yatai: the little wooden food carts you find in Japanese streets at night. There are five kinds:

  • Noodles: stock pots, and bowls of ramen set out on the counter.
  • Tea: an urn, cups, and wagashi sweets on little plates.
  • Oden: a divided pot of daikon, eggs and fish cakes.
  • Bakery: buns under a glass hood.
  • Onigiri: rows of rice balls with their nori bands.

Each stall has a slatted wooden counter with red stools and a corrugated roof with upturned eaves. A short noren curtain in the stall's own colour hangs under a wooden sign board. Paper lanterns hang at the front corners, menu tags line the back board, and big cart wheels sit at the sides.

Five Japanese food stall carts side by side: noodles with a red curtain, tea with green, oden with blue, a bakery with ochre and onigiri with indigo, each with paper lanterns, a slatted counter and red stools
Noodles, tea, oden, bakery and onigiri.

Robots on a rail

Above the stalls, a monorail runs round the whole concourse, and three small serving robots hang from it. Each glides along at a gentle walking pace and stops in front of a stall. It lowers its tray on a telescoping arm down to the counter, for whoever is sitting there, then draws it back up and moves on. It picks a bowl up at one stop and sets it down at the next. The robots whir softly as they go and give a small two-note ping when a tray reaches the counter.

The rail sits in front of the stall roofs and above head height, so the robots never get in anyone's way.

A small white robot hanging from an overhead rail beside a tea stall, its tray lowered on a long arm to counter height
A robot lowering its tray at the tea stall.

The tram runs

E Deck's tram used to be a fade to black and a jump. Now you ride it. Choose a station at the kiosk, and you're sitting by a window in the tram car. It glides down the track, picking up speed and slowing as it pulls in. You can look around as it goes. A chime sounds as it leaves and again as it arrives, and the motor hum rises and falls with its speed. The longest ride, bow to engineering, takes about half a minute.

Four views from a tram ride: boarding the car, the car under way, a side window and stepping off on the platform
Boarding, under way, the side window, and the platform.

The crew eat

At meals the crew now eat properly. Each holds a rice bowl in one hand and lifts chopsticks to their mouth with the other. Their own bowl leaves the tray while they eat, and it goes back down when they stop. They no longer all lift their chopsticks at the same moment, and if you talk to someone, they put down their chopsticks and turn to you.

The galley also got its walls dressed: wood wainscot, rows of hand-written menu tags, a paper lantern over every table and noren at both ends of the hall. A soft murmur of voices and bowls fills the room at mealtimes.

A crew member in a shrine maiden's white kimono eating at a galley table, holding a rice bowl and raising chopsticks
Tsuneo at lunch.

Two more crew

Two more of the owner's VRoid characters have come aboard. Like everyone else on the ship, they're invented, and their names and roles are provisional.

  • Mizuki Ōno, the comms officer. She sends the ship's messages and receives the replies, slowly. She'll tell you that the 64-metre dish at Usuda in Nagano was built to talk to two little probes on their way to Halley's Comet, in 1985.
  • Hideko Hasegawa, the archivist. She keeps the mission records and asks for gloves before you touch anything. Her favourite is the report from Hayabusa2, whose capsule came down in Australia in December 2020 with about five grams of the asteroid Ryugu.
Character sheets for two crew members in the fleet's navy service dress: a young woman with chestnut hair in low pigtails, and one with long navy-blue hair
Mizuki and Hideko. Names and roles are provisional.

They have cards in the Logbook's "Also aboard" row, with the four who came aboard last time. And everyone's trouser hems are now straight: VRoid's trousers end in jagged strips, which looked ragged above the low shoes some of the crew wear.

Rooms

Another run of rooms on the crew's routes is furnished.

  • The memory core: a glass column of slowly turning lit discs, behind a low rail, surrounded by racks of glowing memory cells. This is where Reo works.
  • The nursery: cots under star mobiles, a story corner with cushions, little tables with drawings, and toy shelves.
A dark room with a glass column of glowing blue discs inside a low rail, ringed by racks of lit cells; and a pale nursery with wooden cots under the windows, small round tables and a story corner
The memory core, and the nursery.
  • The nav computer room: a star-chart table whose hologram of rings and stars turns slowly, with the ship's course as an amber line leading away.
  • The comms room: an operator's desk under screens marked INBOUND and OUTBOUND, a model dish antenna, and three clocks: SHIP, FLEET and HOME.
A hologram of rings and stars above a glowing round table between racks of lights; and a comms room with a curved desk under a wide screen and a model dish antenna
The nav computer room, and comms.
  • The archive: glass display cases and record cases beside the heritage gallery.
  • The engineering workshops: workbenches with pegboards of tools, red tool chests, and machine bays with a lathe, a 3D printer and a robot arm.
A long archive with bookcases along one wall and glass display cases down the middle; and an engineering workshop with a 3D printer on a yellow-lined bay and workbenches with pegboards behind
The archive, and the workshops.
  • Yuki's cabin: a wood floor, a futon bed under a print, a low tea table on tatami, and a reading chair.
  • Sato's stores: wooden racks of rice sacks, crates, jars and paper rolls, with his ledger on the desk by the door.
A captain's cabin with a futon bed, a desk under the window, a low tea table on a tatami mat and a reading chair; and a storeroom of wooden racks with crates, jars and rice sacks
Yuki's cabin, and the stores.

On the canopy deck, the ship's course is now set into the floor as a brass line. It starts at the Sun, passes the eight planets at their true distances, scaled down, and runs on under the model of the Yamabiko toward the bow.

A long walkway at night under a starry glass roof, with a brass line in the floor, small inlaid planets, low lit posts along its edges and seating groups on either side
The ship's course in the canopy deck floor.

What is still rough

  • The tram car rides through its tunnel with blank walls outside the windows.
  • The new crew's hands still press into their jackets for a moment as they get up from a bench.
  • The serving robots don't notice you yet.

What's next

More for the newest crew to say, and a look at the rooms that are still on their first, simpler furnishing.

Disclaimer

This is a work-in-progress development log. Everything shown is a prototype and is subject to change without notice.

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