Thursday, April 22, 2021

A Derelict Crawl On A Ship With No Name

After leaving the station, Elise lent some medical assistance to Linns, who was still groggy and unwell. She was low on nutrients, specifically salts, as if they were used up by some overwhelming force of some kind. Rodney asked if there were a way he could learn to do that, but Linns only laughed. Abilities like that are limited to the Sylvan race; humans just aren't built for it. In fact, all Sylvan abilities are different; not everyone can read minds or conjure electricity. The tall, thin man they met was the clan's best mind-reader, for instance.

The crew argued back and forth over where to go, and importantly, what to name their ship; after some discussion (and much consulting of random generators), it was decided to name the ship the SS Hephestus, after the god of forges. That settled, they began the slow scan of the system, looking for the derelict ships in the area. They found three, which Linns said was all that were still around:

Flying Sprint: Feeder-class cargo/container ship. Well explored, and unlikely to have much useful cargo left.

Unnamed vessel: passenger ship; the outer decks have been swept clean, but the inner decks are largely untouched; it takes a day and a half to get to the very center. The back end of the ship has been utterly destroyed. Still, there are some secondary power sources, and a small colony.

Darksider: Battlecruiser class ship (Huge), known to be very dangerous. Smaller than the unnamed vessel, but full of automated defenses and strange creatures.

They eventually decided on the unnamed ship, and after a 6 hour trip, found a good place to latch on and enter. Linns remained behind on the ship, to continue scanning for danger. Inside, the halls were stripped clean of anything useful, and notes were scratched, carved, painted, or burned into the walls: who to call for a good time, what evil lurked within, and what supplies other camps had planned to bring "next time". Near an elevator shaft, the crew found a large diagram written by many hands, showing what areas had been cleared. With little time and lots of firepower, they decided to attempt a direct route into the heart of "danger" territory, reasoning that the more dangerous the journey, the more rewarding the treasure that awaited.

Two hours in, and they had found little of interest; they were still following on the heels of many other explorers and scrappers. Finally, they made contact with some of the local, er, wildlife. Wild "life" anyway. The skeletal figure in a damaged EVA suit lurched towards them, but didn't make it more than a few steps before it was blasted to pieces. While on fire, actually, thanks to Nix's plasma gun. Further in, they ran into a rather nasty-looking creature in a more recent suit, with a long, drooling tongue. It was flanked by two more astronaut-skellies. Elise fired off a shot, and the creature hurled one of the skellies into the beam! Elise continued firing, wearing the creature down; Rodney pounded the second skelly into powder, and after the leader-type creature tried to give Rodney a high-powered turbo-lick, Elise blasted a big ol' hole in it, whereupon it melted into gray slime that quickly dried to dust...

Not a bad start for a derelict-crawl, but it's likely there will be further horrors awaiting within...

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