Death and Chocolate
The Deepnight Revelation is on the last leg of its outward mission, having just arrived at the system of Hahosi at the trailing edge of sector VS-X. As part of the final preparations for their arrival at their destination, some of the command staff are wanting to run some final tests and exercises.
The Captain wants to ensure that the Deepnight is in as good a condition as is possible, and that there are no final surprises. She orders that the Engineering team make a full, detailed, sweep of the ship over the next few jumps. They are given permission to draft in other members of the crew if necessary.
The flight commander, Commander Makamu, Sir Alexi Vanaadi and Commodore Bruntein of the Solomani flag ship have a plan to do a combined forces exercise. They have come up with an idea for a ‘hot’ extraction scenario – rescuing ground crew whilst under fire. The Solomani vessels can provide heavy fire support, with the Deepnight’s advanced scouts providing covering support for the pinnaces and boats as they try to extra crew from a planet’s surface as quickly as possible. Security teams can provide simulated anti-air fire from the surrounding surface.
The system of Hemigucu, five jumps away, has been identified as a good candidate for running this exercise. If it turns out not to be suitable, another system can be found.
I wanted to have the NPCs driving some things before the final mission, and also maybe introduce, or re-introduce, some of the NPCs.
The players decide to break out some of the chocolate they have stored aboard their own ship – brought all the way from Imperium space and carefully kept for special occasions. They also have luxury consumables, mostly unused except for the occasional diplomatic party.
Whilst the ship is in jump to the next system, they spot that some of the chocolate has been raided. Not only that, but someone threw up over it after stuffing themselves.
They did a DNA test to find which crew member was responsible, and were surprised to find that the culprit was a Droyne. Or more likely, a Chirper. Possibly one of those that got aboard their ship a while back, which they thought they had got rid of.
Their first though was to set a trap, which hadn’t been what I was expecting. I was expecting more of a trying to track it with cameras and the like. They ended up with a chocolate chipped tracker, which the Chirper stole on a following night. This gave them something to track – except that the Chirper’s psionic “I am not here” field made reading the tracking difficult.
At least until the players remembered (after some prompting) that they had a Psi Helmet. So some of them, including Elama who I had introduced last week who had an excellent knowledge of the ship’s crawl spaces and Annalysse “Elbows” Evalii went looking for a Chirper.
Once they had a plan, and made a couple of reasonable skill checks, I allowed them to find and subdue the Chirper with stun weapons. They promptly placed him in a cold speed berth.
The original plan for this had been for the Chirper to be raiding the ship’s vending machines, but as soon as the players brought up the subject of their chocolate stores, the plan got changed.
At their next destination, they refueled and restocked on supplies from the world’s small, but fish filled, seas. Whilst performing general scans of the planet, they noticed an unusual meteorite crater. It was up in high northern latitudes, cold and dry, but showed signs of organic material. This was the result of a random “How well did they do” roll for refuelling and resupply, and I got a result of “scanning detects something useful”.
I had been thinking of running one of the scenarios in the Expeditions book for Deepnight, or at least a modified version of it. This has the Deepnight coming across a ‘sleeper’ ship. So far out from civilisation, I was going to make it a slower than light ship. Ultimately, I decided that it would be moving too fast for the Deepnight to be able to catch up with it (probably ~10% of light speed), so dropped that idea earlier in the week. I thought about it again to fulfill this result, but eventually decided it would be a sample of the Entity/Fungus in a meteorite crater.
It had hit a part of the world with no life, so the Entity had nothing to consume and grow. When the crew find it, they detect it as dormant fungus material.
One of the Solomani NPCs (Dr Madeline Berg) asks if they can run some experiments with it. Infect the seas of this world and see how quickly it consumes them. Khadashi thinks this is an insanely stupid idea, and points out that there are plenty of videos of the Entity doing its stuff.
Bu Dr Berg, or any of the Solomani, haven’t actually seen it for themselves. They just have the word of the Imperials. It would also be new data, since nobody has seen what it does when it starts infecting a real world environment. They’ve only ever seen the after effects. The bio-warfare team would also like to test their new weapons in a real world situation.
So it is finally decided to seal off a couple of large lakes, and introduce the dormant Entity to them. There’s always a chance for something to go wrong… but they get the best possible success on a check, so it provides lots of useful information as to the speed of growth, and also how it grows. They also get to try out some of their anti-Fungal bioweapons. Some work, some don’t.
They spend about a month on the world recovering their data, then try their best to wipe out all life in the two lakes before heading onwards.
There’s going to be a couple of weeks break before the next session. Due to work, and wanting time to do some prep for the final destination, there needs to be a bit of a break.
