![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothLast night was the shadake space game, which went a lot better than last week. Even though Snowwy didn't make it. This pattern suggests that perhaps I should try to have at least one person absent each week. }:P
But anyway, Mhurdok did bring in a new character, who was probably even cheesier than his old one, but using magic instead of technology, which meant that rules for it existed already.
Hesperius, his new character, is basically an Illiski, although he's actually a hannah that was raised by Illiski and genetically modified to have a somewhat enhanced version of their illusion powers. He has an imaginary friend that everyone else can see and talk to and even touch. He thinks he's a superhero.
But he wasn't on the ship at the start of the night's game. It started with Shadarack and Jackie watching the light show in the cargo bay of the ship as it started to de-ionize, and the systems gradually came back online. Adam had left to check on their prisoner, and Ozar was furiously building his energy-dampening bomb in the lounge to stop the Gems of Io from draining the energy from his fighter.
The hum of the engines cmae back up to full power... and kept going -- and they realized that with no one at any of the controls, the energy allocation was still set to pour full power into the engines -- which was about five times as much as they were rated for, and could (in the worst case) burn out the inertial dampeners and leave the entire crew as bloody smears on the back wall of the ship. Fortunately, the ionization was dissipating slowly enough that they'd have some warning...
Jackie suddenly lurched, as his familiar was tossed off his shoulder by a hiccup in the dampeners and smacked against a wall, and everyone ran for the bridge.
It was relatively simple to reset the energy allocation, and override Ozar's lock on the flight controls, but the com system was down, and seemed to be physically disabled, or at least beyond Shadarack's power to re-enable from the bridge. But it didn't matter *too* much -- they were at full speed again, and the enemy was nowhere to be seen, but *had* to be far behind them, since no Nezumi could match a Jaguar going all out for speed. Shadarack plotted a long, looping course that would bring them back to Mars, where he planned to sell the gems.
Then coughed and choked as the entire ship was filled, once again, by the 'healing smoke' from one of Jackie's alchemical concoctions, which he'd set off in a sealed cabin to heal his familiar, without remembering to seal off the air circulation.
Shadarack couldn't see the controls, but the ship took voice commands. It didn't have an AI, or even a bound spirit, however, so the commands had to be given in a formal syntax in order to be interpreted unambiguously.
"Tell system 'life support' set air circulation to maximum air circulation, end tell."
So the smoke cleared up soon enough, and the immediate crisis seemed to be over -- even the lightning in the docking bay was gone. So Shadarack set a proximity alarm to wake him if anything approached within sensor range, and went to sleep, which Jackie stayed up on watch, playing 'Pokemon Celestial' to stay awake.
A few hours later, both were startled and/or awoken by the alarm, as the ship rapidly approached what had to be a life pod, with a surprisingly low relative velocity. Jackie remembered, from the video games he'd played, that life pods were supposed to be scooped up in passing, so he told the ship to flip around, and opened the cargo bay to let it slip inside. Shadarack joined him on the bridge just in time to hear it ricochet off Ozar's fighter and slam into the back wall of the cargo bay.
Shadarack immediately ran to investigate, and saw a pair of small black spiders skittering down the hallway towards him, very fast. He fired his pistol at the pair, slightly wounding one, then felt momentarily scrambled as it leaped at him and passed entirely through his body. Seeing more of them in the cargo bay just down the hall, along with an eerie red glow, he took another potshot and ducked into the nearest cabin, which happened to be where the prisoner was being held.
The cabin wasn't safe, though, as spiders started coming in through the air vents! The first jumped on the prisoner's face, and started sinking into her body, and Shadarack's attempts to scrape it off were futile -- and he couldn't shoot it without hurting her, as his gun fired explosive bubbles. He did manage to kill the second spider that came in and started attacking him -- bouncing off his PPF now, as he'd remembered to activate it. He went to the console and started trying to find the command to seal off the vents in cabin 9, only to see large black legs start to protrude from the Illiski's sides...
So he ran back out into the corridor, where Jackie, after firing off the rest of the shells loaded in his pistol more or less uselessly, had switched back to using his backpack as a weapon, and quickly squashed the pair in the corridor. Jackie and Shadarack headed for the cargo bay, where they saw a quartet of strange sparkly creatures flying around the bay, shooting lasers at more of the spiders, and doing a pretty good job of killing them off.
The strange fractal creature was Hesperius and some summoned fractals. He'd awoken immediately upon crashing into the cargo bay, as the stasis field on his life pod burned out, but seeing the spiders that had come in with him, had kept himself locked in the pod until he'd summoned some 'friends' and activated his superhero uniform (armor, pistol, and force field). He'd actually emerged to fight the creatures only a few seconds before Jackie and Shadarack came to the bay.
But before he could finish off the last spider, a berzerk Ozar opened the door to engineering, where he'd been hiding, and threw his energy dampening bomb -- which killed the last spider, dispelled Hesperius' illusions -- momentarily, he instantly put his normal fennec-hannah guise back up, which was VERY CLOSE to what he actually looked like anyway, since he was really a fennec-hannah, but had some extras like clothing and well groomed fur -- and everyone's PPFs, and otherwise caused more harm than good.
With all the confusion cleared, it was also obvious that the Gems of Io had not been left unscathed by all the excitement. Instead of a natural-looking formation of giant red crystals embedded in rock, they were now a smooth honeycomb-patterened sphere, with a large swath of slightly curved hexagons lying on the floor nearby where the pod had ricocheted off them on its path towards the wall of the cargo bay. No one made much attempt to explain or examine the alteration, though, as there were more pressing matters, like the new passenger.
While Jackie and Shadarack made the acquaintance of Hesperius and Katara, his fennec friend whom he helped out of the life pod, Ozar stalked the cargo bay looking for more spiders. He found one, finally, in Adam's room -- a big one! And Adam himself was nowhere to be seen!
Everyone rushed to attack the giant spider, and it was soon clear that most of their weapons -- magitech pistols of various flavors -- just couldn't affect it. But Jackie's backpack could. And Hesperius recreated his weapon at lower damage but higher 'magical success level' and could damage it as well, doing the last bit of punishment to disperse the beast.
Adam dropped to the floor where the spider had been, unconscious. At which point Shadarack revealed that the same thing had happened to the prisoner -- there was (at least) on more spider still on the ship! They ran to cabin 9 and repeated the process, Ozar firing his bubble-gun wildly to distract the beast so that Jackie and Hesperius could hit it more easily with the weapons that actually did damage.
When this spider was dispersed, the figure that dropped to the floor was not the naked fox-woman the Illiski had previously disguised herself as, but an even younger, female version of Jackie.
"Big brother! You rescued me again! Thank you so much!"
Jackie panicked and ran away. Shadarack was creeped out too, and pointed his gun at the small figure as it lay on the ground.
"Uncle, why are you pointing that at me?" she asked in a worried voice. Shadarack whimpered and closed and locked the door.
After showing Hesperius (Katara was mysteriously absent now) to his cabin (which was immediately 'remodeled' to be a multi-room suite instead of the 12-square-meter cabin it really was), Shadarack set the proximity alarms again, and everyone went to sleep. Even Hesperius, who *handn't* been up for 24 hours, eventually got tired. It was a long way to Mars.
They were woken up by another alarm, and Shadarack leapt out of bed and down the hatch to the bridge, where he saw that somehow, a gigantic rainbow-patterned Pangolin class UTNM destroyer had snuck up within 500 meters of them, and was quickly closing to dock. He tried to hail them, and realized that, yes, external communications were still down and disabled. Soon he was able to talk to them over the intercom, though, and agreed to let them inside. He headed to the cargo bay, where they'd docked, and did so.
"Up against the wall! Hands in the air!" shouted the patrol of heavily armed and armored Manis and Hannah, in cyan and purple battle armor with the symbol of an eight-armed paracil, the elite marines of the USS Sirhan Sirhan.
Shadarack complied quickly, as did the rest of the crew, and after the soldiers found no giant antimatter bombs or other extreme contraband, they questioned them as to just *why* they were heading towards Mars on a reckless course, ignoring traffic control and all attempts at communications.
"It looks like their comm was sabotaged," said the engineer they brought to check it out.
"I had to shut it down to keep them from hacking us," Ozar volunteered.
"We were attacked by pirates!" Shadarack quickly added.
The soldiers seemed to accept that explanation, but scolded them for leaving it turned off and scaring everyone. They would be let go on their way, however, as soon as they did a routine check of the ship's ID.
Which of course turned up multiple claims against it. Atari corporation had it reported as stolen, and the Ran corporation had a monetary claim against it to offset damage to their base during the space battle the party and Atari's Nezumi had had in their docking bay.
None of the claims were clearcut, however, and certainly no *criminal* charges could be filed for the theft, since it was 'stolen' from The High Seas, where theft was legal (and, arguably, the entire purpose for the habitat's existance). So the destroyer told them they'd be escorted to Diemos base, where their ship would be impounded pending resolution of the disputed ownership.
As he'd won the ship in a card game on an Illiski habitat from an employee of a corporation based in Asia, fought a space battle out in Jupiter space where he annoyed a corporation based on Luna, and now it was going to be impounded in Mars orbit by a UTNM delegation whose home port was India, the only thing clear was that settling the case would probably take a long time. And if they wanted to win, they'd need a lawyer. But Shadarack wasn't even really sure he wanted to fight for it, since he'd only intended to borrow the ship in the first place.
Oh, and before the soldiers left -- before they even really checked the ship's records -- the illiski prisoner was interrogated, and happily told them that she was Jackie's little sister, who'd been kidnapped and enslaved by Maytag and forced to act as an 'autopilot' for their ships.
There were still a couple hours before they arrived at Diemos, so the crew set out to loot the ship of everything portable before it was taken out of their hands.
last session next session
But anyway, Mhurdok did bring in a new character, who was probably even cheesier than his old one, but using magic instead of technology, which meant that rules for it existed already.
Hesperius, his new character, is basically an Illiski, although he's actually a hannah that was raised by Illiski and genetically modified to have a somewhat enhanced version of their illusion powers. He has an imaginary friend that everyone else can see and talk to and even touch. He thinks he's a superhero.
But he wasn't on the ship at the start of the night's game. It started with Shadarack and Jackie watching the light show in the cargo bay of the ship as it started to de-ionize, and the systems gradually came back online. Adam had left to check on their prisoner, and Ozar was furiously building his energy-dampening bomb in the lounge to stop the Gems of Io from draining the energy from his fighter.
The hum of the engines cmae back up to full power... and kept going -- and they realized that with no one at any of the controls, the energy allocation was still set to pour full power into the engines -- which was about five times as much as they were rated for, and could (in the worst case) burn out the inertial dampeners and leave the entire crew as bloody smears on the back wall of the ship. Fortunately, the ionization was dissipating slowly enough that they'd have some warning...
Jackie suddenly lurched, as his familiar was tossed off his shoulder by a hiccup in the dampeners and smacked against a wall, and everyone ran for the bridge.
It was relatively simple to reset the energy allocation, and override Ozar's lock on the flight controls, but the com system was down, and seemed to be physically disabled, or at least beyond Shadarack's power to re-enable from the bridge. But it didn't matter *too* much -- they were at full speed again, and the enemy was nowhere to be seen, but *had* to be far behind them, since no Nezumi could match a Jaguar going all out for speed. Shadarack plotted a long, looping course that would bring them back to Mars, where he planned to sell the gems.
Then coughed and choked as the entire ship was filled, once again, by the 'healing smoke' from one of Jackie's alchemical concoctions, which he'd set off in a sealed cabin to heal his familiar, without remembering to seal off the air circulation.
Shadarack couldn't see the controls, but the ship took voice commands. It didn't have an AI, or even a bound spirit, however, so the commands had to be given in a formal syntax in order to be interpreted unambiguously.
"Tell system 'life support' set air circulation to maximum air circulation, end tell."
So the smoke cleared up soon enough, and the immediate crisis seemed to be over -- even the lightning in the docking bay was gone. So Shadarack set a proximity alarm to wake him if anything approached within sensor range, and went to sleep, which Jackie stayed up on watch, playing 'Pokemon Celestial' to stay awake.
A few hours later, both were startled and/or awoken by the alarm, as the ship rapidly approached what had to be a life pod, with a surprisingly low relative velocity. Jackie remembered, from the video games he'd played, that life pods were supposed to be scooped up in passing, so he told the ship to flip around, and opened the cargo bay to let it slip inside. Shadarack joined him on the bridge just in time to hear it ricochet off Ozar's fighter and slam into the back wall of the cargo bay.
Shadarack immediately ran to investigate, and saw a pair of small black spiders skittering down the hallway towards him, very fast. He fired his pistol at the pair, slightly wounding one, then felt momentarily scrambled as it leaped at him and passed entirely through his body. Seeing more of them in the cargo bay just down the hall, along with an eerie red glow, he took another potshot and ducked into the nearest cabin, which happened to be where the prisoner was being held.
The cabin wasn't safe, though, as spiders started coming in through the air vents! The first jumped on the prisoner's face, and started sinking into her body, and Shadarack's attempts to scrape it off were futile -- and he couldn't shoot it without hurting her, as his gun fired explosive bubbles. He did manage to kill the second spider that came in and started attacking him -- bouncing off his PPF now, as he'd remembered to activate it. He went to the console and started trying to find the command to seal off the vents in cabin 9, only to see large black legs start to protrude from the Illiski's sides...
So he ran back out into the corridor, where Jackie, after firing off the rest of the shells loaded in his pistol more or less uselessly, had switched back to using his backpack as a weapon, and quickly squashed the pair in the corridor. Jackie and Shadarack headed for the cargo bay, where they saw a quartet of strange sparkly creatures flying around the bay, shooting lasers at more of the spiders, and doing a pretty good job of killing them off.
The strange fractal creature was Hesperius and some summoned fractals. He'd awoken immediately upon crashing into the cargo bay, as the stasis field on his life pod burned out, but seeing the spiders that had come in with him, had kept himself locked in the pod until he'd summoned some 'friends' and activated his superhero uniform (armor, pistol, and force field). He'd actually emerged to fight the creatures only a few seconds before Jackie and Shadarack came to the bay.
But before he could finish off the last spider, a berzerk Ozar opened the door to engineering, where he'd been hiding, and threw his energy dampening bomb -- which killed the last spider, dispelled Hesperius' illusions -- momentarily, he instantly put his normal fennec-hannah guise back up, which was VERY CLOSE to what he actually looked like anyway, since he was really a fennec-hannah, but had some extras like clothing and well groomed fur -- and everyone's PPFs, and otherwise caused more harm than good.
With all the confusion cleared, it was also obvious that the Gems of Io had not been left unscathed by all the excitement. Instead of a natural-looking formation of giant red crystals embedded in rock, they were now a smooth honeycomb-patterened sphere, with a large swath of slightly curved hexagons lying on the floor nearby where the pod had ricocheted off them on its path towards the wall of the cargo bay. No one made much attempt to explain or examine the alteration, though, as there were more pressing matters, like the new passenger.
While Jackie and Shadarack made the acquaintance of Hesperius and Katara, his fennec friend whom he helped out of the life pod, Ozar stalked the cargo bay looking for more spiders. He found one, finally, in Adam's room -- a big one! And Adam himself was nowhere to be seen!
Everyone rushed to attack the giant spider, and it was soon clear that most of their weapons -- magitech pistols of various flavors -- just couldn't affect it. But Jackie's backpack could. And Hesperius recreated his weapon at lower damage but higher 'magical success level' and could damage it as well, doing the last bit of punishment to disperse the beast.
Adam dropped to the floor where the spider had been, unconscious. At which point Shadarack revealed that the same thing had happened to the prisoner -- there was (at least) on more spider still on the ship! They ran to cabin 9 and repeated the process, Ozar firing his bubble-gun wildly to distract the beast so that Jackie and Hesperius could hit it more easily with the weapons that actually did damage.
When this spider was dispersed, the figure that dropped to the floor was not the naked fox-woman the Illiski had previously disguised herself as, but an even younger, female version of Jackie.
"Big brother! You rescued me again! Thank you so much!"
Jackie panicked and ran away. Shadarack was creeped out too, and pointed his gun at the small figure as it lay on the ground.
"Uncle, why are you pointing that at me?" she asked in a worried voice. Shadarack whimpered and closed and locked the door.
After showing Hesperius (Katara was mysteriously absent now) to his cabin (which was immediately 'remodeled' to be a multi-room suite instead of the 12-square-meter cabin it really was), Shadarack set the proximity alarms again, and everyone went to sleep. Even Hesperius, who *handn't* been up for 24 hours, eventually got tired. It was a long way to Mars.
They were woken up by another alarm, and Shadarack leapt out of bed and down the hatch to the bridge, where he saw that somehow, a gigantic rainbow-patterned Pangolin class UTNM destroyer had snuck up within 500 meters of them, and was quickly closing to dock. He tried to hail them, and realized that, yes, external communications were still down and disabled. Soon he was able to talk to them over the intercom, though, and agreed to let them inside. He headed to the cargo bay, where they'd docked, and did so.
"Up against the wall! Hands in the air!" shouted the patrol of heavily armed and armored Manis and Hannah, in cyan and purple battle armor with the symbol of an eight-armed paracil, the elite marines of the USS Sirhan Sirhan.
Shadarack complied quickly, as did the rest of the crew, and after the soldiers found no giant antimatter bombs or other extreme contraband, they questioned them as to just *why* they were heading towards Mars on a reckless course, ignoring traffic control and all attempts at communications.
"It looks like their comm was sabotaged," said the engineer they brought to check it out.
"I had to shut it down to keep them from hacking us," Ozar volunteered.
"We were attacked by pirates!" Shadarack quickly added.
The soldiers seemed to accept that explanation, but scolded them for leaving it turned off and scaring everyone. They would be let go on their way, however, as soon as they did a routine check of the ship's ID.
Which of course turned up multiple claims against it. Atari corporation had it reported as stolen, and the Ran corporation had a monetary claim against it to offset damage to their base during the space battle the party and Atari's Nezumi had had in their docking bay.
None of the claims were clearcut, however, and certainly no *criminal* charges could be filed for the theft, since it was 'stolen' from The High Seas, where theft was legal (and, arguably, the entire purpose for the habitat's existance). So the destroyer told them they'd be escorted to Diemos base, where their ship would be impounded pending resolution of the disputed ownership.
As he'd won the ship in a card game on an Illiski habitat from an employee of a corporation based in Asia, fought a space battle out in Jupiter space where he annoyed a corporation based on Luna, and now it was going to be impounded in Mars orbit by a UTNM delegation whose home port was India, the only thing clear was that settling the case would probably take a long time. And if they wanted to win, they'd need a lawyer. But Shadarack wasn't even really sure he wanted to fight for it, since he'd only intended to borrow the ship in the first place.
Oh, and before the soldiers left -- before they even really checked the ship's records -- the illiski prisoner was interrogated, and happily told them that she was Jackie's little sister, who'd been kidnapped and enslaved by Maytag and forced to act as an 'autopilot' for their ships.
There were still a couple hours before they arrived at Diemos, so the crew set out to loot the ship of everything portable before it was taken out of their hands.
last session next session
