Author: Dan

The Long Haul – Session One

(Session Zero: https://plus.google.com/100103557430240856115/posts/gaVZQVUGBRP )

After a firefight aboard the space station BX-1 where Yeerk accidentally shot and disabled HMMR, The Crew (Ace Kyllian the Rogue Pilot, HMMR the Mercenary Warbot, Dr. Susan Black the Mad Scientist, and Yeerk the brain slug infesting a giant) was tasked by the degenerate merchants known as The Cloaked Hand to extract a few of their best technicians from the sun-baked hellish wasteland of Robillard 2.

On the long journey to their destination, Ace and a damaged HMMR fought over HMMR stooping down so low socially as to converse with Ace’s AI-crew and translate on Ace’s behalf – resulting in Ace tossing a hammer at HMMR and forcing him into an inactive power-saving mode so Yeerk could fix him up in the Manufactory.

Meanwhile, Yeerk and Dr. Black (or Dr. Suse) spoke at length to each other over their shared passion of science and discovery. Yeerk spoke about his favorite body to inhabit – the spacefaring Drenash – because their telepathy and heightened pheromone control makes it possible to read multiple minds, instead of just its host. Dr. Suse, for her part, regaled Yeerk with stories of accidentally murdering station guards during an experiment and refusing to be bothered to patch them up – resulting in a revoked medical license and expulsion from a fairly nice space station.

As The Crew neared Robillard 2 the reality of a post-apocalyptic hellscape became apparent. Planetary defenses being minimal, they kept their class 2 starship, “Best Little Spaceship in Texas”, in orbit with Otto, Ace’s AI crew, and an inanimate HMMR staying aboard. Once the three organic crew members landed with Yeerk’s armored medevac shuttle, “The Bug-Out”, they sorted through a local currency shakedown for fuel by the fixed-base operator. After Yeerk demanded a receipt, it took a quick forgery from Ace to advance the mission.

The FBO attendant had directed The Crew through a few narrow and twisting alleyways in the ramshackle city, in order to reach the meeting point for the mysterious team at The Rusty Mallet, the largest tavern in the town. On their way the crew stopped by a poor excuse for a tavern called The Dead Orphan and gawked at some humans and a Kraki inside. Yeerk, using horrible mouth sounds and both hands, showcased his proficiency with the Kraki language. With a rough sense of foreboding, The Crew continued toward their objective.

The Rusty Mallet may be the largest tavern in the unnamed slum-town, but it wasn’t much to speak for either. The patrons wore the same dirty rags and clothes as the rest of the citizens but were armed with enough shivs for The Crew to assume there was a shiv-based economy here. Standing out from the rabble were three mysterious Syrynns, later known as Nuala, Amedee, and Imryll. The Syrynns were the Class 4 Crew that needed to be extracted, Fearless Regenerating Beautiful Alien Techs, but after a few minutes of unconvincing persuasion and harassment from The Crew, the Syrynns left The Rusty Mallet and sought to evade their harassers.

Ace and Dr. Black worked together to slowly corral the three techs toward the spaceport/FBO while Yeerk ran back to The Bug-Out in order to expedite pickup. Unfortunately, an Outercores ship landed and shut down at the FBO – including members of Yeerk’s host’s strike team. Only able to access one of his host’s memories about the two humans and power-fisted Vortai that stepped out of the boarding craft, Yeerk made the sensible decision to disable their ship with three expert lobs of his grenade launcher before dashing towards his shuttle.

Everything went to shit after this.

While the humans were distracted by a rescue effort to get anyone out of the ship that might still be alive (unlikely), the power-glove-fisted Vortai pursued Yeerk and was gaining on him – until Yeerk let a haphazard few blasts out of his shotgun. The effort dispatched the Vortai, but not without one of its gloves discharging into The Bug-Out’s landing gear, causing enough structural damage to allow for take-off, but prohibit most standard landings.

Meanwhile, Ace and Dr. Black had corralled the three technicians to a tall building covered in people wearing more dirty rags and loose-fit clothing. It had the makings of a hospital or drug den but the two adventurers rolled their dice, since they needed the height more than anything. Over intercom, Ace confused and frustrated Yeerk by clogging up the comms in an effort to help Yeerk hover the back-ramp of the shuttle over the top of hospital building. Instead of that, Yeerk half-crashed the back of the ship into the hospital, wedging it into rubble and several occupied gurneys.

Ace and Dr. Black struggled against the crowd forming around them after the tragic landing, and in a panic Dr. Black began throwing needles at the people around her to clear the crowd. The distraction worked for the three Syrynns and Ace, but Dr. Black received several bruises for her trouble. Eventually The Crew loaded the beautiful alien technicians into The Bug-Out, but it was still wedged tightly into the adobe-concrete walls. Yeerk and Ace worked together to rock the shuttle back and forth as if it were stuck in mud or snow, and barely succeeded. That is, they succeeded but the hasty application of full-thrusters from Yeerk seamlessly transformed the drug den into a burn ward. The Crew was airborne before they could smell the flesh or hear the screams.

Once airborne, Yeerk and Ace fought each other for the shuttle controls which led to the spaceport autocannons easily tracking their movements and damaging their fuel cells. With an idea and hope, Ace decided to fly recklessly in lieu of making fuel calculations on a safe place to land. The gambit paid off, and The Bug-Out was able to make it to their ship’s small hangar, half-crashing into the floor and skidding to a stop safely, as they had little fuel left to leak into their mothership.

The Crew secured Nuala, Amedee, and Imryll into passenger quarters, nicknaming them Cargo 1, Cargo 2, and Cargo 3, before getting in their crew positions. With Ace piloting the ship, Yeerk manning his manufactory, and Dr. Black secured in her med bay, the ship made its way to the initial jump point.

All was not clear, however, and a single rickety fighter-speeder from Robillard 2 sought to avenge the surface wrongdoings by way of blaster fire. A lucky shot temporarily broke The Crew’s shields while Yeerk prepared a salvo of magnetic mines. Unfortunately, the minelayer mechanism jammed dangerously, and Ace’s bid to help by changing his flight regime only made things worse – one mine did leave the ship but missed the snub fighter and actually propelled into closer range of the Best Little Spaceship In Texas. Dr. Black, having seen enough of the other two working together for the day, slid into the ship’s bottom point defense turret and successfully blasted the fighter out of the sky without much effort.

It was clear sailing after this, though the starship and shuttle were damaged and Dr. Black was recovering from the kicks and punches. Stuck together in a cramped ship with a few days to kill, Ace tried to learn more about the Syrynns and their employers but wound up impressing upon them his prowess and exploits as one of the finest pilots in the quadrant, if not galaxy.

Dr. Susan Black bonds with Yeerk again, recounting the first time she accidentally murdered a human colony by developing a strand of tomato that was resilient, but also absorbent. While it was a sustainable food source, the colonists couldn’t sustain such high levels of heavy metals. Either luckily or purposely, Dr. Black expressed her distaste for tomatoes and was spared her own experiment gone wrong. Yeerk reveals to her that her tomatoes are still used in experiments or secret operations.

Yeerk and Ace bond together in the ship’s lift, during what could be called an elevator/bottle episode, and Yeerk admits that he’ll let Ace fly more often. The two exit the elevator after a day and laugh off their previous struggles against each other.

Eventually the crew reaches the rendezvous point for their technician passengers, The Cloaked Hand’s premiere facility in Quadrant 1, their massive space station BX-1. It’s a brutal galactic marketplace where all sorts of alien or unsavory goods are available. The Crew meets up with their handler, a “southern” accented Kraki named Scooter. Scooter is odd for a Kraki and is one of the few space fireflies that commits to his theme by wearing a rhinestone cowboy hat and using his broadcast antennae to approximate a cowboy accent using electrical means instead of using mandibles.

The Crew successfully delivers the three beautiful Syrynns technicians to Scooter and the rest of The Cloaked Hand and are rewarded with a Class 4 shopping allowance which was extravagant for the space-adventurers who often found themselves with shoddy or handmade equipment, but at the end of the day they only added armor to The Bug-Out and purchased three repair kits due to the poor state of affairs with their ship.

For now, they remain docked and enjoying the “safe” company of BX-1’s crew and passengers.

The Long Haul – Session Zero

We had session zero last night and I’ve gotta say, I still don’t know exactly what session one will look like. Here’s some of the setting so far, though. Other than the Yeerk and Humans, each race was modeled after one of the ability scores.

Races

Humans: They are the scrubs of the galaxy and remain the most wide-spread once The Interface allowed them off their rock. Races use them as pets, breeding stock, experiments, or labor. It’s often thought by other races that a planet colonized by humans is either entertaining to behold, or a lost cause. In this way, humans have been used aggressively by factions, races, or clans as buffers against each other.

The Interface: Absolute/Dominant symbiotic AI that evolved from humanity’s first crude attempts at creation. As far as sci-fi references go, they’re somewhere between the Star League, TechnoCore, and Citadel in terms of attitude and function. While their true existence isn’t widely known or understood, their shadow government uses untold numbers of hosts from the other races to make the galaxy work toward their goals. They generally keep the peace, as well as enough outlets for violence between factions or races that it’s never turned toward the masters. Synthetics rule the galaxy, whether anyone knows it or not. The Sphere is the name of their government, and the seat of their power – at the center of the galaxy a massive Dyson Sphere operates as their own citadel and boasts a population of every species the size of several planets. The three Interface factions split along their lines when it came to decide their next move after leaving humans on their home-rock for several generations. The Sphere maintains order and chaos within tolerances across the galaxy, as well as the major jump points. The Stack is a mythical anti-organic faction that are only told as boogeymen, not as a real threat, and The Unbound exist in the very edges of the galaxy masquerading as humans or Dranesh exploring the unknown.

Dranesh: Evolved Weightless/Zero-G living, pheremone using humanoids. Bald and tattooed mystics and space wanderers and philosophers. They’re the most likely to use space magic, but even that is rare and mostly a myth thought up by ignorant humans. They speak to each other using subtle body language and pheremones but have to temporarily disable that bodily function when dealing with the other races. Only the Kraki are able to understand the pheremones without reciprocating with muddied and overwhelming signals themselves. The body odor from Vortai or Humans may as well be yelling gibberish at the Dranesh. They organize themselves in three factions; those violent revolutionaries that want to take back their home world, the majority that live in huge flotillas that slowly explore the galaxy, and a small sect of cultists that spread the word of an unknown star god.

Vortai: Evolved Giant Peter Dinklage Space Dwarves. They’re massive, patriarchal (usually taken to toxic extremes), and organize themselves in squabbling clans that at least sometimes listen to the most powerful clan in a time of need. Instead of ships they more often mine out asteroids and use them for clanholds and transportation. It’s better for everyone to keep Vortai separate. Before any contests of strength get out of hand.

Syrynns: Beautiful unisex androgynous and bio-luminescent humanoids. They use DNA borrowed from skin contact made with the other races to fertilize the eggs they’ve previously laid. Originally they came from one planet and the lack of genetic diversity led to them basically cloning themselves – so they had to reach the stars, and quickly. As a result, most Syrynns still look very similar. They are the most successful politicians and leaders, and use that role to ensure enough peace in the galaxy to allow for easier access to genetic material. Second most populace after Humans.

Kraki: Xeno Space Fireflies. They can survive in space, use antennae to broadcast, and can perceive other bands visually (or electrically). Their society is a meritocracy that eschews family bonds in favor of intellect, productivity, and benefit to society.

Yeerk: Ascendant Symbiotes ripped from Animorphs. The Interface use them as a prison sentence; instead of incarceration or death, prisoners become unwilling hosts and live out the rest of their days helpless while the Yeerk use their bodies for the betterment of society.