Two Chicks with Guns
The previous session of Alien ended with Wilson shooting at the blood burster that ripped itself out of the body of Dan Cooper, one of the crew of the USCSS Cronus. Most of the rest of us rushed into the med bay to see Wilson standing there with a shotgun, and Cooper laying dead on the floor with his head in pieces. Our initial assumption was obvious, and wrong.
The creature had run out of the room and vanished out of sight, and now there was a lot of shouting and panicking among the characters. There was also a lot of shouting and talking over each other from the players, which resulted in some people not being heard about what they wanted to do, and some people not being able to act because they didn’t know what had happened.
Wilson and Valerie head off with a motion tracker to look for the thing, with Wilson handing his shotgun over to Valerie since she might actually be able to use it. Davis joins them, with a pulse rifle she picked up from the armoury, and they go hunting bugs.
Two chicks with guns, I’m staying with them.
— John Wilson, company representative
Back in the med lab, the old crew explain that they picked up some sort of infection whilst exploring some ancient ruins on LV-1113, but thought they had inoculated themselves. A search of Cooper’s body reveals that he was an anti-vaxxer, with a dose of the vaccine still in his pocket.
I manage to get the med pods working, and give everybody a scan. A few of the old crew show signs of having a benign tumour, but there’s nothing obviously living in anyone. So after a short discussion we all take the vaccine.
Out of their crew, they are missing Eva, who is a synthetic, though we have to explain that the term “Artificial Person” is more accepted these days. She had stayed awake whilst the rest of them went into cold sleep, and nobody has seen her since then.
Wanting to give the body of Cooper a scan, I try to put him into the second medpod, which is somewhat stained with blood, but unfortunately discover that it also contains a body – which isn’t dead. The corpse, with too long arms, tries to grab at me as I open the pod, but I dodge back and Davis shoots it.
Our next plan is to try and repair the ship – fixing the air scrubbers, and repairing the bridge. Gradually be begin to get things working – we need the ship working so we can claim our bonus (though I also grab some more of the whisky, which might be worth something). The science labs are off limits – one has been destroyed in a fire, and the other is filled with alien growths which need to be destroyed in a fire.
In the process of exploration we find the inert body of Eva, so I take her up to the bridge to try and fix her, whilst the rest of our crew head back to our ship to restock on fresh oxygen tanks and get some flame throwers.
As I’m trying to clean up the artificial person, I’m suddenly panicked by the sight of our ship gliding past the bridge window – the crew have decided to do a runner without me! On full acceleration, the bright burn of its engines dwindles to a point – and then suddenly explodes in a massive and silent flash of light. Whatever happened, they seem to have killed themselves.
