Mages are from Mars
Jan. 3rd, 2004 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothWell, today we had the first real session of the shadake space RPG I'm running now, and it went a lot better than last week. Because, you know, everyone was there, and people cooperated with the part of the plot that had to go a certain way to make things work (aka 'getting the party to actually meet each other').
Let us begin with a 'treasure hunter' by the name of Shadarack, a feline hannah from noplace in particular, who found himself engaged in a cutthroat game of poker on the faux-pirate illiski habitat known as The High Seas, where many people rich enough to afford space travel (which is almost everyone, in these enlightened times) and who have a taste for bloody piracy (or bloody pirate-hunting) but not a taste for actual death (as the 'period' weapons used for the faux-piracy are shadow matter, and can't actually kill) go to play at being a sea rat... and others go to trade goods or information in a forum where the laws are a bit lax.
This game was more amusing than most, as it had a mark who was... not very experienced with this kind of poker, and seemed to be under the impression that luck and skill at bluffing would carry the day. While everyone else was cheating. He was soon stripped of every world possession, including the key to a spaceship... not the captain's key, but the pilot's key, which was almost as good.
Wasting no time, he headed to the harbor to see if he could actually claim his prize, and to his delight found the ship deserted. It was a modified Jaguar, by the look of it, made up to resemble a manta ray -- which meant he could pilot it by himself, although he'd need a crew of at least four to fly it properly.
Lifting out of the water, he set a course for deep space... Mars, he felt, would be the best place to find a crew, as it was far enough away that the other ships in port -- lumbering Varani -- would be several hours behind, even if they set to chasing him immediately. As he accelerated towards the red planet, a 'biohazard warning' went off in cabin 10, so he sealed it up, then went to take a nap in one of the cabins, while the autopilot steered the ship on its way.
Meanwhile, on Mars, Jackie and Adam were in their apartment, in their respective rooms, going about their business, the altercation at the arena mostly forgotten, when Jackie's familiar meeped and hid as a large crow, cawing and fluttering, battered at the window. Ever curious, Jackie let it in.
With a caw, the bird glowed, for a second, an obviously magical spell... so Jackie pulled out a bottle and sucked it inside. It had already done something to Jackie's clothing, however, which resisted his movements, then tried to strangle him...
Adam heard the commotion and wandered in to check it out, and saw Jackie struggling to disrobe. He decided to lend him a hand, being much bigger, although only a little stronger, than the tiny alchemist, and the clothing started trying to wrap him up, as well.
Some light was shed on the situation, as the figure of a Zox -- the same Zox who'd chased him earlier in the day, and now obviously the same Zox that he'd had unfortunate dealings with 8 years ago, back on the Silver Moon -- appeared and threatened him. "I will have my revenge on you, Adam, no matter where you run or what form you take. You will be mine forever, body and soul!" He turned to Jackie. "You! Kill him."
No one's ever accused Adam's enemy of being sane.
Jackie found himself compelled to obey the instruction, but Adam dodged out of the room and shut the door behind him, so instead of landing on him, the half ton of rocks that Jackie unbottled landed in a pile against the door, which creaked and started to collapse. Adam and Jackie grabbed their respective weapons, and advanced on each other. Adam bought a little time by unleashing a spell bead, wrapping Jackie up in mummy wrappings for a few seconds, then beat him over the head with the hilt of his sword, knocking him out.
He tied Jackie up, and called his other friend Ozar, informing him of the situation, and asking him to come over for everyone's safety, since they were apparently under siege. Ozar brought his fighter with him -- a refurbished Beetle, from back when Mars had needed to import ships for its defense, altered almost beyond recognition, with a long thin needly gun instead of the bulky emitter from the original beetle, and a two-man cockpit.
But no one else attacked, and when Jackie awoke, the compulsion was apparently gone. They asked around, and read e-mail, and found that there was an incoming ship looking for a crew for a 'very lucrative mission', no questions asked, hiring in three hours at the space port. They also found that Mars was perhaps not so safe of a place to stay, as with forged evidence, Adam's Zox 'friend' had gotten permission from the local Magistrate to prosecute a blood feud against him.
On the way to the spaceport, they were nearly ambushed by a Chittick with a Very Big Gun, but the fighter flying escort over their taxi dissuaded him.
Not long after they arrived at the large open field that passed for a spaceport in the relative backwater where Adam, Jackie, and Ozar lived, the Manta landed, and was refueled and resupplied by the space port, on the captain's account (although they insisted on the captain's digital signature before supplying anything but the basics). With a little calculation and some measurements, it was determined that Ozar's fighter could *just* fit inside the cargo hold (the problem not being its raw volume, but it's long spindly nature), and everyone piled on board, and without further ado they lifted off.
Jackie was disappointed that Shadarack hadn't even wanted to check his resume, but busied himself looking through all the cabins, which seemed to have rather a lot of personal possessions for the previous crew to have 'forgotten'. One cabin even had an herb garden, which had some of the more usual alchemical herbs. The manifest was written in Procyonisk, but with a little searching around in his pouches of holding, Jackie was able to produce a translator, and inventory the stock.
Ozar headed right for engineering, where he saw that the strange magitech device which filled up a third of the cargo bay took up about a third of engineering as well -- and a section of the hull, where the tail was attached, had been cut away to add a larger generator and extra thruster units, which wasn't something of much use to a modern ship, as it was the inertial dampeners that determined how fast it could accelerate while still being massless, and at the same time made even the smallest push accelerate it very fast.
There was an opening in the wall of magitech into which a person could squeeze, and after a quick check with a periscope showed it winding its way out of engineering and into the section of magitech in the cargo bay, Ozar squeezed in to follow it. After several dozen meters, he reached what looked like a medieval torture chamber -- a hannah-sized space, studded with hundreds or thousands of needles to pierce anyone placed within. Ozar kept his head, despite his fear of needles, but quickly got far away from the scary torture chamber.
A few hours passed uneventfully, with the crew manning various stations as they cleared the asteroid belt and headed into the more dangerous outer region, where monsters were known to roam. It wasn't long before they were attacked -- stealthed elementals, like black holes in nothing with tentacles, phased through the hull of the ship into engineering and onto the bridge.
In engineering, Ozar whipped out his energy blade and drove the elemental away from the generator that it had tried to attach itself to, but was sucked inside it by the counterattack, and found himself in vaccuum. He was wearing his pressure suit, at least -- he had a custom model, attached to his wings, which allowed him to jet around in vaccuum as well as keeping him breathing -- and from inside the monster was much less able to dodge his blade. It attached itself to the generator, though, quickly growing much, much larger, so Ozar quickly shut off the power as soon as it got big enough that he could reach the controls from inside.
On the bridge, Adam and Shadarack fired their guns at the elemental, mostly missing it but smashing the consoles and viewscreens with stray shots. Shadarack was sucked inside, but also had a vac suit clipped to his belt (modern space suits were simple force-field generators), so after taking a second to turn it on was not in immediate danger from anything but Adam's blasts and the shockwaves from his own bubble gun.
After a few exchanges, Jackie arrived from the herb garden he'd been enthralled by, and shot a 'magic disruption' shell sort of vaguely in the direction of the elemental. It missed, hit a console, disenchanted it, disabled the ship's damage control readouts... and a few seconds later, the generator shut down.
"Cool! It works!"
With the power off, the elemental lost interest in being slowly picked to death by gnats, and phased back out of the ship, slamming Shadarack against the wall of the bridge, although his Personal Protection Field absorbed the blow. The trio decided to head for engineering to make sure Ozar was all right, as he hadn't communicated with them since the attack started.
Ozar was doing all right, slashing at the monster with his energy blade to try to cut a hole through which he might escape -- and pulled off the feat just as his space suit started to lose power, drained by the elemental. Which, fortunately, was just as the rest of the crew arrived to help deal with it.
With the generator shut down, the party was in free fall, which made Adam's decision to switch to swinging his blade around in sword mode a bit questionable, as this sent him spinning wildly across the room, eventually slamming into a set of power couplings that, had the generator been active, might have fried him to a crisp. He did get some hits in, as did Ozar and Shadarack, and they were slowly picking away at the elemental, while it went after sources of power -- Ozar's blade, Shadarack's gun -- snatching them out of their owner's hands to devour at its liesure.
Jackie, meanwhile, was being a menace. A flashy miscast paraded obviously fake 'scary' things in everyone's faces, he put Shadarack to sleep for half a minute with a VERY badly aimed 'calming' shot, and then he hit the wall of strange magitech with a shell designed to just do random shit, and it started radiating jealousy.
Jealous of the wall, the elemental attached to it, and tried to eat it. This made it easier to hit, while the party -- jealous of the elemental trying to steal 'their wall' -- was only egged on to do so. Adam, tired of flying around bouncing off the walls and other equipment, deliberately dove inside the elemental, where it was harder to miss, and slashed it up badly enough to scare it away.
Ozar wasn't willing to let it get away that easily. He stalked out of engineering, closing the door firmly behind him, then evacuated the air from the cargo bay (without power, this meant cracking the door to vent it into space) and clambered into his fighter, powering it up and taking it out to finish off the elementals.
The big one was long gone, but some others were swarming, attracted by the power signature of the fighter, now. He was a bit better with the sensors than Adam, and managed to target them, and in three passes took them all out, while dodging their attempts to attach and suck the life out of his fighter.
Then he parked back in the cargo bay, sealed it up, and... realized he had no way of getting back into engineering to turn the generator back on, to power up life support, to repressurize the cargo bay, so that he could get back into engineering without exposing the party to vacuum.
A quick talk over their communicators revealed that they had a problem -- one of Jackie's wild-magic healing potions had sucked the power out of their space suits and PPFs, and Shadarack had tried to turn the generator on, but the power couplings Adam smashed had shorted out and tripped the breaker (oh, and had sent lighting shooting around threatening to incinerate them).
So Ozar opened the tanks on his fighter, letting all the air out to partially pressurize the cargo bay, then opened up engineering, leaving the party choking but not explosively decompressing right away -- then they went around and opened up all the other compartments, leaving them with enough thin air to breathe for an hour or so, as long as they didn't move much, while Ozar worked on getting power back up.
Shadarack made sure not to open Cabin 10, which was now unlocked with the power down. Jackie did open it, and found a bloody mess, like some human sized animal had been smashed flat with hammers, then spread all over the walls. Had the inertial dampener failed, in this room only? If it had, this was the sort of thing that could have resulted.
Half-dried globules started drifting out into the cargo bay... so he stepped inside and closed the door behind him, then pulled out a bottle and sucked the blood and gore inside. Cleaning up messes was a very basic use of bottle magic. The rest of the room was filled with a snowstorm of 'paperwork' -- zero-thickness plastic sheets, mostly forms and memos from a middle-manager of the Atari corporation managing subordinates back on Atari's orbital habitat, attached to 'Project Nullspace'. Nothing on the printouts gave any clue as to what the project was about, or what part this ship played in it. Jackie gathered all the sheets into a zero-thickness bundle, and stored it away.
After an hour, the power came back on, Shadarack let Jackie out of the now re-locked cabin 10, and insisted he did NOT want the bottle of gore. Jackie could keep it. The sensors were brought back up, showing no sign of the black elementals, but sitting right in their way was a giant green tentacly space squid, large enough to swallow ships whole. Shadarack had heard tales about such beasts, and suggested allowing themselves to be swallowed, so that they could loot the other ships sure to be trapped inside, but the rest of his crew overruled him, and altered course to swing wide around the monster and continue towards Io.
last week next week
Let us begin with a 'treasure hunter' by the name of Shadarack, a feline hannah from noplace in particular, who found himself engaged in a cutthroat game of poker on the faux-pirate illiski habitat known as The High Seas, where many people rich enough to afford space travel (which is almost everyone, in these enlightened times) and who have a taste for bloody piracy (or bloody pirate-hunting) but not a taste for actual death (as the 'period' weapons used for the faux-piracy are shadow matter, and can't actually kill) go to play at being a sea rat... and others go to trade goods or information in a forum where the laws are a bit lax.
This game was more amusing than most, as it had a mark who was... not very experienced with this kind of poker, and seemed to be under the impression that luck and skill at bluffing would carry the day. While everyone else was cheating. He was soon stripped of every world possession, including the key to a spaceship... not the captain's key, but the pilot's key, which was almost as good.
Wasting no time, he headed to the harbor to see if he could actually claim his prize, and to his delight found the ship deserted. It was a modified Jaguar, by the look of it, made up to resemble a manta ray -- which meant he could pilot it by himself, although he'd need a crew of at least four to fly it properly.
Lifting out of the water, he set a course for deep space... Mars, he felt, would be the best place to find a crew, as it was far enough away that the other ships in port -- lumbering Varani -- would be several hours behind, even if they set to chasing him immediately. As he accelerated towards the red planet, a 'biohazard warning' went off in cabin 10, so he sealed it up, then went to take a nap in one of the cabins, while the autopilot steered the ship on its way.
Meanwhile, on Mars, Jackie and Adam were in their apartment, in their respective rooms, going about their business, the altercation at the arena mostly forgotten, when Jackie's familiar meeped and hid as a large crow, cawing and fluttering, battered at the window. Ever curious, Jackie let it in.
With a caw, the bird glowed, for a second, an obviously magical spell... so Jackie pulled out a bottle and sucked it inside. It had already done something to Jackie's clothing, however, which resisted his movements, then tried to strangle him...
Adam heard the commotion and wandered in to check it out, and saw Jackie struggling to disrobe. He decided to lend him a hand, being much bigger, although only a little stronger, than the tiny alchemist, and the clothing started trying to wrap him up, as well.
Some light was shed on the situation, as the figure of a Zox -- the same Zox who'd chased him earlier in the day, and now obviously the same Zox that he'd had unfortunate dealings with 8 years ago, back on the Silver Moon -- appeared and threatened him. "I will have my revenge on you, Adam, no matter where you run or what form you take. You will be mine forever, body and soul!" He turned to Jackie. "You! Kill him."
No one's ever accused Adam's enemy of being sane.
Jackie found himself compelled to obey the instruction, but Adam dodged out of the room and shut the door behind him, so instead of landing on him, the half ton of rocks that Jackie unbottled landed in a pile against the door, which creaked and started to collapse. Adam and Jackie grabbed their respective weapons, and advanced on each other. Adam bought a little time by unleashing a spell bead, wrapping Jackie up in mummy wrappings for a few seconds, then beat him over the head with the hilt of his sword, knocking him out.
He tied Jackie up, and called his other friend Ozar, informing him of the situation, and asking him to come over for everyone's safety, since they were apparently under siege. Ozar brought his fighter with him -- a refurbished Beetle, from back when Mars had needed to import ships for its defense, altered almost beyond recognition, with a long thin needly gun instead of the bulky emitter from the original beetle, and a two-man cockpit.
But no one else attacked, and when Jackie awoke, the compulsion was apparently gone. They asked around, and read e-mail, and found that there was an incoming ship looking for a crew for a 'very lucrative mission', no questions asked, hiring in three hours at the space port. They also found that Mars was perhaps not so safe of a place to stay, as with forged evidence, Adam's Zox 'friend' had gotten permission from the local Magistrate to prosecute a blood feud against him.
On the way to the spaceport, they were nearly ambushed by a Chittick with a Very Big Gun, but the fighter flying escort over their taxi dissuaded him.
Not long after they arrived at the large open field that passed for a spaceport in the relative backwater where Adam, Jackie, and Ozar lived, the Manta landed, and was refueled and resupplied by the space port, on the captain's account (although they insisted on the captain's digital signature before supplying anything but the basics). With a little calculation and some measurements, it was determined that Ozar's fighter could *just* fit inside the cargo hold (the problem not being its raw volume, but it's long spindly nature), and everyone piled on board, and without further ado they lifted off.
Jackie was disappointed that Shadarack hadn't even wanted to check his resume, but busied himself looking through all the cabins, which seemed to have rather a lot of personal possessions for the previous crew to have 'forgotten'. One cabin even had an herb garden, which had some of the more usual alchemical herbs. The manifest was written in Procyonisk, but with a little searching around in his pouches of holding, Jackie was able to produce a translator, and inventory the stock.
Ozar headed right for engineering, where he saw that the strange magitech device which filled up a third of the cargo bay took up about a third of engineering as well -- and a section of the hull, where the tail was attached, had been cut away to add a larger generator and extra thruster units, which wasn't something of much use to a modern ship, as it was the inertial dampeners that determined how fast it could accelerate while still being massless, and at the same time made even the smallest push accelerate it very fast.
There was an opening in the wall of magitech into which a person could squeeze, and after a quick check with a periscope showed it winding its way out of engineering and into the section of magitech in the cargo bay, Ozar squeezed in to follow it. After several dozen meters, he reached what looked like a medieval torture chamber -- a hannah-sized space, studded with hundreds or thousands of needles to pierce anyone placed within. Ozar kept his head, despite his fear of needles, but quickly got far away from the scary torture chamber.
A few hours passed uneventfully, with the crew manning various stations as they cleared the asteroid belt and headed into the more dangerous outer region, where monsters were known to roam. It wasn't long before they were attacked -- stealthed elementals, like black holes in nothing with tentacles, phased through the hull of the ship into engineering and onto the bridge.
In engineering, Ozar whipped out his energy blade and drove the elemental away from the generator that it had tried to attach itself to, but was sucked inside it by the counterattack, and found himself in vaccuum. He was wearing his pressure suit, at least -- he had a custom model, attached to his wings, which allowed him to jet around in vaccuum as well as keeping him breathing -- and from inside the monster was much less able to dodge his blade. It attached itself to the generator, though, quickly growing much, much larger, so Ozar quickly shut off the power as soon as it got big enough that he could reach the controls from inside.
On the bridge, Adam and Shadarack fired their guns at the elemental, mostly missing it but smashing the consoles and viewscreens with stray shots. Shadarack was sucked inside, but also had a vac suit clipped to his belt (modern space suits were simple force-field generators), so after taking a second to turn it on was not in immediate danger from anything but Adam's blasts and the shockwaves from his own bubble gun.
After a few exchanges, Jackie arrived from the herb garden he'd been enthralled by, and shot a 'magic disruption' shell sort of vaguely in the direction of the elemental. It missed, hit a console, disenchanted it, disabled the ship's damage control readouts... and a few seconds later, the generator shut down.
"Cool! It works!"
With the power off, the elemental lost interest in being slowly picked to death by gnats, and phased back out of the ship, slamming Shadarack against the wall of the bridge, although his Personal Protection Field absorbed the blow. The trio decided to head for engineering to make sure Ozar was all right, as he hadn't communicated with them since the attack started.
Ozar was doing all right, slashing at the monster with his energy blade to try to cut a hole through which he might escape -- and pulled off the feat just as his space suit started to lose power, drained by the elemental. Which, fortunately, was just as the rest of the crew arrived to help deal with it.
With the generator shut down, the party was in free fall, which made Adam's decision to switch to swinging his blade around in sword mode a bit questionable, as this sent him spinning wildly across the room, eventually slamming into a set of power couplings that, had the generator been active, might have fried him to a crisp. He did get some hits in, as did Ozar and Shadarack, and they were slowly picking away at the elemental, while it went after sources of power -- Ozar's blade, Shadarack's gun -- snatching them out of their owner's hands to devour at its liesure.
Jackie, meanwhile, was being a menace. A flashy miscast paraded obviously fake 'scary' things in everyone's faces, he put Shadarack to sleep for half a minute with a VERY badly aimed 'calming' shot, and then he hit the wall of strange magitech with a shell designed to just do random shit, and it started radiating jealousy.
Jealous of the wall, the elemental attached to it, and tried to eat it. This made it easier to hit, while the party -- jealous of the elemental trying to steal 'their wall' -- was only egged on to do so. Adam, tired of flying around bouncing off the walls and other equipment, deliberately dove inside the elemental, where it was harder to miss, and slashed it up badly enough to scare it away.
Ozar wasn't willing to let it get away that easily. He stalked out of engineering, closing the door firmly behind him, then evacuated the air from the cargo bay (without power, this meant cracking the door to vent it into space) and clambered into his fighter, powering it up and taking it out to finish off the elementals.
The big one was long gone, but some others were swarming, attracted by the power signature of the fighter, now. He was a bit better with the sensors than Adam, and managed to target them, and in three passes took them all out, while dodging their attempts to attach and suck the life out of his fighter.
Then he parked back in the cargo bay, sealed it up, and... realized he had no way of getting back into engineering to turn the generator back on, to power up life support, to repressurize the cargo bay, so that he could get back into engineering without exposing the party to vacuum.
A quick talk over their communicators revealed that they had a problem -- one of Jackie's wild-magic healing potions had sucked the power out of their space suits and PPFs, and Shadarack had tried to turn the generator on, but the power couplings Adam smashed had shorted out and tripped the breaker (oh, and had sent lighting shooting around threatening to incinerate them).
So Ozar opened the tanks on his fighter, letting all the air out to partially pressurize the cargo bay, then opened up engineering, leaving the party choking but not explosively decompressing right away -- then they went around and opened up all the other compartments, leaving them with enough thin air to breathe for an hour or so, as long as they didn't move much, while Ozar worked on getting power back up.
Shadarack made sure not to open Cabin 10, which was now unlocked with the power down. Jackie did open it, and found a bloody mess, like some human sized animal had been smashed flat with hammers, then spread all over the walls. Had the inertial dampener failed, in this room only? If it had, this was the sort of thing that could have resulted.
Half-dried globules started drifting out into the cargo bay... so he stepped inside and closed the door behind him, then pulled out a bottle and sucked the blood and gore inside. Cleaning up messes was a very basic use of bottle magic. The rest of the room was filled with a snowstorm of 'paperwork' -- zero-thickness plastic sheets, mostly forms and memos from a middle-manager of the Atari corporation managing subordinates back on Atari's orbital habitat, attached to 'Project Nullspace'. Nothing on the printouts gave any clue as to what the project was about, or what part this ship played in it. Jackie gathered all the sheets into a zero-thickness bundle, and stored it away.
After an hour, the power came back on, Shadarack let Jackie out of the now re-locked cabin 10, and insisted he did NOT want the bottle of gore. Jackie could keep it. The sensors were brought back up, showing no sign of the black elementals, but sitting right in their way was a giant green tentacly space squid, large enough to swallow ships whole. Shadarack had heard tales about such beasts, and suggested allowing themselves to be swallowed, so that they could loot the other ships sure to be trapped inside, but the rest of his crew overruled him, and altered course to swing wide around the monster and continue towards Io.
last week next week
