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terryclothToday was the Scifi Shadake game, which went fairly well, despite Shadarack being absent again. This week, he couldn't come because he has training for a new job early tomorrow morning. Also, since he's working Fridays in Seattle, he's going to just bus down to Renton instead of bussing to Bellevue so that I can pick him up and drive him to Renton.
After the incident with vacuum bugs, and the biohazard warning, Shadarack locked himself in the bridge (and, consequently, the others out of the bridge). The others didn't notice for a while, because they were busy modifying space suits and creating alchemical concoctions that would protect against Io's particularly nasty radiation.
When they neared Io, Shadarack asked Ozar to use the Engineering console to steer the ship through the twisty little corridor in the side of the largest volcano... which Ozar *tried* to do, with little success -- running the entire ship by himself from the auxiliary controls was a bit of a distraction, and he managed to ram it into a wall after speeding through a dangerous cascade of molten sulfur... leaving the tip of the tail stuck in the sulfur.
A quick modification to a space suit kept the ship from losing air (normally this wouldn't even be a possibility, but the tail was a hacked on addition piercing the hull of the ship), but the ship's engine was fried -- in particular, an expensive component regulating the inertial dampener was fried. It'd take at least a day and a half for Ozar to enchant a new one, which Shadarak insisted was way too long, since other people might be after the same treasure. He offered to stay behind and try to make repairs (and at least watch the ship so it didn't wander off) while the others headed to retrieve the treasure from the volcano, using the map, which he sent them.
Fortunately, the front end of the ship, where the main airlock was located, was *almost* lined up with some lava tubes that honeycombed this part of the volcano, and with some bottle magic and hacking about with weapons, a path was cleared to squeeze through. The air was thin, poisonous, and averaged about 400 degrees C, but that was within acceptable tolerances for the space suits.
Jackie enthusiastically took the lead, and immediately fell through a weak section of floor, into a gooey molten sulfur flow. He was pulled out before he could get *too* toasted.
A bit later, they ran into a superheated blast of hot gases, then an explosion of rock shards, and then a swarm of crawling and flying molten-sulfur-bugs appeared and swarmed around them, sending them running. Ozar picked up Jackie and flew off down the tunnel very fast, quickly outdistancing Adam... who fell in another molten lava trap, shouting for help and flailing at the bugs as he started sinking.
Ozar and Jackie turned back, and managed to reach him before he was completely submerged and/or incinerated. Ozar struggled to pull him out, while Jackie bottled the swarming bugs that landed on the sinking pseudo-Zox (Adam). Once he was out, they started running again, brushing off the remaining bugs as they ran.
After a bit, they reached the cavern they were *supposed* to land in, where a bunch of one-legged, six-tongued toads devoured most of the insect swarm. Just a little past that was the thousand-foot drop down an open shaft -- a currently dormant adjunct of the main volcanic vent, which was erupting -- at the bottom of which they could see a dark ciruclar shape silhouetted against the molten rock. The map led down the shaft, and marked the circle with an X.
Now, Ozar could fly, even carrying Jackie, but not carrying Adam. He could drift downwards with Adam in his grip, since the moon's gravity was lighter than the air was thin, and the shaft had a powerful updraft -- but how would they get out? "I'll bottle you," Jackie said to Adam, "I can't get your space suit or anything else enchanted, but we can unbottle you back in the ship where you won't need it." Adam agreed, as the alternative was being left behind.
On the way down, they were pestered by a pair of swimmie-like fire elementals. Jackie decided to start shooting at them with his gun (missing horribly, as he was a horrible shot) and they fired back with mini-fireballs, which Ozar mostly dodged. Adam also fired back a few times, hitting once to no great effect, then Jackie made an illusion of a 'floor' in the shaft above them, which fooled both of the enemies into breaking off the assault.
And just in time, as the top half the black ovoid below them unfolded into a gigantic spider, which crouched down, waiting...
Jackie and Adam fired at it, to no effect, then dropped towards the entrance in the actual sphere, between the spider's legs, trying to dodge as it attacked them. Adam got hit, and instantly driven insane, blathering and running in fear, then sitting down to contemplate horror.
Ozar also dove for the hole, but got pegged by the Spider of Doom before he could get deep enough to be out of its reach. Jackie grabbed him, prevented him from flying out to do battle with it, and rubbed 'anti-insanity' salve on him until he was lucid.
Both Adam and Ozar recovered shortly, although not unscathed -- Adam was deathly afraid of the color black, and Ozar violently enraged by the sight of anything spider-like (which, unfortunately, would include the Chittick, one of the two major races living primarily on the silver moon). Jackie lit a 'mental influence dampening' sparkler, to relieve the effects for a while.
The immediate scare over, they inspected their surroundings -- grayish stone walls, with magically glowing red gems set every dozen meters or so. Temperature: relatively cold. Air: still unbreathable. Adam pried out one of the gems as a souvenier, and they set out deeper into the tunnel to find the *real* treasure.
And after a bit, they did. Meepas (Jackie's familiar) heard voices, so they snuck closer, listening to a pair of engineers argue about the best way to modify their burrower to carry out 'the find', until they were given away by their sparkler shortly after finding a place to watch their foes, a group of scientists from the Maytag corporation, out to poach their treasure!
The consensus was rapid: attack and destroy. Jackie tossed a smoke bomb at the Chittick standing guard, while simultaneously casting an 'illusionary light' spell on her, which illuminated what you *expected* to see instead of what was actually there. Ozar, enraged at the sight of a 'spider', shot her with his pistol -- and she started firing back at the 'space pirates' she imagined were responsible, who weren't standing where the party actually was.
Meanwhile, Adam and Jackie cooperated to kill the two procyonisks working on modifying their vehicle -- Jackie broke one's neck, while Adam shot the other in the chest with his rifle. Neither had much of a chance to put up a fight.
That left only the vehicle as an opponent. It had appeared uncrewed, but came to life and attacked Jackie, narrowly missing him with a very large, scary cold ray. But the vehicle had an open crew compartment, and Jackie leaped inside and held a gun to the 'autopilot's head, as he sensed something wrong with the picture. It seemed to work. "No disassemble," the computer said, by way of surrender.
Ozar fired into the Chittick again and again until she was a puddle of goo.
After killing or capturing the Maytag crew, the party looted them of their cold-ray pistols, and used their mummy-wrappings of weaver-silk to wrap up the prize -- a set of gigantic, glowing, fiery crystals radiating a great magic. They reconfigured the burrowing drill on the front of the vehicle to sit on the back and act as a clamp, and climbed inside, forcing the illiski (as Ozar and Jackie could see, although it refused to admit that it wasn't just a computer) driving the thing to fly them outside. Ozar warned her about the big spider waiting for them, and told her to fire at it right away as soon as they came out.
Which she did, wounding it badly, then fled up the shaft with it in hot pursuit! Jackie fired some shells at it (missing completely) while ordering the illiski to run for the exit, which he pointed out, while Ozar raged at the monster and ordered the illiski to turn around and fire at it more. Adam just cowered. It was BLACK!
Ozar and Jackie argued back and forth about it, but couldn't come to an agreement before the illiski, acting on her own initiative, ran the hell away. Once they were in a smaller tunnel, she stopped to let Ozar out, and he took the cold pistols with him to the opening to the shaft, reconfigured them to to act as grenades, and tossed them at the monster, finishing it off just before it came close enough to reach him with its horrid claws.
The rest of the flight back was pretty uneventful, as the hazards that had given them a little trouble on the way in weren't really dangerous to the vehicle they were flying now. They hacked and cleared away the entire airlock opening, removed all the furniture from the lounge (into which the main airlock opened), and used the whole room as a giant airlock to bring in the burrower vehicle, repurposing the lounge as hangar 2. The illiski was unhooked from the controls, 'transforming' into a beautiful, naked fox-woman in the process, and strapped down to an acceleration couch in one of the empty cabins, with a laser scanner set up to monitor her movements (not impossible for an illiski to spoof, but harder than just changing her own appearance, which was all they'd seen her do).
In the engine room, Shadarack had managed to disable the entire engine subsystem in the process of trying to fix it -- his idea had been to unhook the trashed inertial dampener so that they could at least accelerate at 5G or so with everyone strapped down. But he'd accidentally unhooked *everything*.
It didn't take long for Ozar to finish the fix as Shadarack had intended it to work, but the resulting speed wouldn't be enough to get out through the wall of lava safely. The vehicle stolen from Maytag had a special force field resistant enough to heat to fly through the volcanic eruption, however, so Ozar inspected it and discovered that it was just a retuning of the standard force field nodes, which he could apply to the ship. The main problem would be extending the ship's field to cover the wings and tail, which weren't currently inside its field. Changing the shape of the field like that meant crawling out onto the ship's hull and welding the nodes into the right spots, which took almost four hours, even with Jackie's help (Jackie moved 1 node, Ozar 19).
With the ship technically mobile, it was rotated so as to allow bringing in the ball of gems, still wrapped up in weaver silk, through the cargo door, then set off shakily on the next leg of its journey.
last week next week
After the incident with vacuum bugs, and the biohazard warning, Shadarack locked himself in the bridge (and, consequently, the others out of the bridge). The others didn't notice for a while, because they were busy modifying space suits and creating alchemical concoctions that would protect against Io's particularly nasty radiation.
When they neared Io, Shadarack asked Ozar to use the Engineering console to steer the ship through the twisty little corridor in the side of the largest volcano... which Ozar *tried* to do, with little success -- running the entire ship by himself from the auxiliary controls was a bit of a distraction, and he managed to ram it into a wall after speeding through a dangerous cascade of molten sulfur... leaving the tip of the tail stuck in the sulfur.
A quick modification to a space suit kept the ship from losing air (normally this wouldn't even be a possibility, but the tail was a hacked on addition piercing the hull of the ship), but the ship's engine was fried -- in particular, an expensive component regulating the inertial dampener was fried. It'd take at least a day and a half for Ozar to enchant a new one, which Shadarak insisted was way too long, since other people might be after the same treasure. He offered to stay behind and try to make repairs (and at least watch the ship so it didn't wander off) while the others headed to retrieve the treasure from the volcano, using the map, which he sent them.
Fortunately, the front end of the ship, where the main airlock was located, was *almost* lined up with some lava tubes that honeycombed this part of the volcano, and with some bottle magic and hacking about with weapons, a path was cleared to squeeze through. The air was thin, poisonous, and averaged about 400 degrees C, but that was within acceptable tolerances for the space suits.
Jackie enthusiastically took the lead, and immediately fell through a weak section of floor, into a gooey molten sulfur flow. He was pulled out before he could get *too* toasted.
A bit later, they ran into a superheated blast of hot gases, then an explosion of rock shards, and then a swarm of crawling and flying molten-sulfur-bugs appeared and swarmed around them, sending them running. Ozar picked up Jackie and flew off down the tunnel very fast, quickly outdistancing Adam... who fell in another molten lava trap, shouting for help and flailing at the bugs as he started sinking.
Ozar and Jackie turned back, and managed to reach him before he was completely submerged and/or incinerated. Ozar struggled to pull him out, while Jackie bottled the swarming bugs that landed on the sinking pseudo-Zox (Adam). Once he was out, they started running again, brushing off the remaining bugs as they ran.
After a bit, they reached the cavern they were *supposed* to land in, where a bunch of one-legged, six-tongued toads devoured most of the insect swarm. Just a little past that was the thousand-foot drop down an open shaft -- a currently dormant adjunct of the main volcanic vent, which was erupting -- at the bottom of which they could see a dark ciruclar shape silhouetted against the molten rock. The map led down the shaft, and marked the circle with an X.
Now, Ozar could fly, even carrying Jackie, but not carrying Adam. He could drift downwards with Adam in his grip, since the moon's gravity was lighter than the air was thin, and the shaft had a powerful updraft -- but how would they get out? "I'll bottle you," Jackie said to Adam, "I can't get your space suit or anything else enchanted, but we can unbottle you back in the ship where you won't need it." Adam agreed, as the alternative was being left behind.
On the way down, they were pestered by a pair of swimmie-like fire elementals. Jackie decided to start shooting at them with his gun (missing horribly, as he was a horrible shot) and they fired back with mini-fireballs, which Ozar mostly dodged. Adam also fired back a few times, hitting once to no great effect, then Jackie made an illusion of a 'floor' in the shaft above them, which fooled both of the enemies into breaking off the assault.
And just in time, as the top half the black ovoid below them unfolded into a gigantic spider, which crouched down, waiting...
Jackie and Adam fired at it, to no effect, then dropped towards the entrance in the actual sphere, between the spider's legs, trying to dodge as it attacked them. Adam got hit, and instantly driven insane, blathering and running in fear, then sitting down to contemplate horror.
Ozar also dove for the hole, but got pegged by the Spider of Doom before he could get deep enough to be out of its reach. Jackie grabbed him, prevented him from flying out to do battle with it, and rubbed 'anti-insanity' salve on him until he was lucid.
Both Adam and Ozar recovered shortly, although not unscathed -- Adam was deathly afraid of the color black, and Ozar violently enraged by the sight of anything spider-like (which, unfortunately, would include the Chittick, one of the two major races living primarily on the silver moon). Jackie lit a 'mental influence dampening' sparkler, to relieve the effects for a while.
The immediate scare over, they inspected their surroundings -- grayish stone walls, with magically glowing red gems set every dozen meters or so. Temperature: relatively cold. Air: still unbreathable. Adam pried out one of the gems as a souvenier, and they set out deeper into the tunnel to find the *real* treasure.
And after a bit, they did. Meepas (Jackie's familiar) heard voices, so they snuck closer, listening to a pair of engineers argue about the best way to modify their burrower to carry out 'the find', until they were given away by their sparkler shortly after finding a place to watch their foes, a group of scientists from the Maytag corporation, out to poach their treasure!
The consensus was rapid: attack and destroy. Jackie tossed a smoke bomb at the Chittick standing guard, while simultaneously casting an 'illusionary light' spell on her, which illuminated what you *expected* to see instead of what was actually there. Ozar, enraged at the sight of a 'spider', shot her with his pistol -- and she started firing back at the 'space pirates' she imagined were responsible, who weren't standing where the party actually was.
Meanwhile, Adam and Jackie cooperated to kill the two procyonisks working on modifying their vehicle -- Jackie broke one's neck, while Adam shot the other in the chest with his rifle. Neither had much of a chance to put up a fight.
That left only the vehicle as an opponent. It had appeared uncrewed, but came to life and attacked Jackie, narrowly missing him with a very large, scary cold ray. But the vehicle had an open crew compartment, and Jackie leaped inside and held a gun to the 'autopilot's head, as he sensed something wrong with the picture. It seemed to work. "No disassemble," the computer said, by way of surrender.
Ozar fired into the Chittick again and again until she was a puddle of goo.
After killing or capturing the Maytag crew, the party looted them of their cold-ray pistols, and used their mummy-wrappings of weaver-silk to wrap up the prize -- a set of gigantic, glowing, fiery crystals radiating a great magic. They reconfigured the burrowing drill on the front of the vehicle to sit on the back and act as a clamp, and climbed inside, forcing the illiski (as Ozar and Jackie could see, although it refused to admit that it wasn't just a computer) driving the thing to fly them outside. Ozar warned her about the big spider waiting for them, and told her to fire at it right away as soon as they came out.
Which she did, wounding it badly, then fled up the shaft with it in hot pursuit! Jackie fired some shells at it (missing completely) while ordering the illiski to run for the exit, which he pointed out, while Ozar raged at the monster and ordered the illiski to turn around and fire at it more. Adam just cowered. It was BLACK!
Ozar and Jackie argued back and forth about it, but couldn't come to an agreement before the illiski, acting on her own initiative, ran the hell away. Once they were in a smaller tunnel, she stopped to let Ozar out, and he took the cold pistols with him to the opening to the shaft, reconfigured them to to act as grenades, and tossed them at the monster, finishing it off just before it came close enough to reach him with its horrid claws.
The rest of the flight back was pretty uneventful, as the hazards that had given them a little trouble on the way in weren't really dangerous to the vehicle they were flying now. They hacked and cleared away the entire airlock opening, removed all the furniture from the lounge (into which the main airlock opened), and used the whole room as a giant airlock to bring in the burrower vehicle, repurposing the lounge as hangar 2. The illiski was unhooked from the controls, 'transforming' into a beautiful, naked fox-woman in the process, and strapped down to an acceleration couch in one of the empty cabins, with a laser scanner set up to monitor her movements (not impossible for an illiski to spoof, but harder than just changing her own appearance, which was all they'd seen her do).
In the engine room, Shadarack had managed to disable the entire engine subsystem in the process of trying to fix it -- his idea had been to unhook the trashed inertial dampener so that they could at least accelerate at 5G or so with everyone strapped down. But he'd accidentally unhooked *everything*.
It didn't take long for Ozar to finish the fix as Shadarack had intended it to work, but the resulting speed wouldn't be enough to get out through the wall of lava safely. The vehicle stolen from Maytag had a special force field resistant enough to heat to fly through the volcanic eruption, however, so Ozar inspected it and discovered that it was just a retuning of the standard force field nodes, which he could apply to the ship. The main problem would be extending the ship's field to cover the wings and tail, which weren't currently inside its field. Changing the shape of the field like that meant crawling out onto the ship's hull and welding the nodes into the right spots, which took almost four hours, even with Jackie's help (Jackie moved 1 node, Ozar 19).
With the ship technically mobile, it was rotated so as to allow bringing in the ball of gems, still wrapped up in weaver silk, through the cargo door, then set off shakily on the next leg of its journey.
last week next week
