Flyover County: Chapter 2

"Spaceship Cabin Interior" by Simon Murton

Continued from Factions & Faction Turn 1 (and more directly from Chapter 1).

Once the crew are up in space, an encrypted signal arrives, directing them to break orbit and head out to the far side of Betharan III. The voyage will take 48 hours, so they have plenty of time to decompress, get to know each other, follow the developing news from Penrose, and chat up Commander Vasia—or, as it turns out, Lieutenant Colonel Mira Kaji, of IRIS's Special Reconnaissance division. Deciding that she's in good hands with the crew, she drops the "Vasia" alias, although she doesn't tell them much about herself or the specifics of her mission.

Mustang gives Kaji one of the Konyri revolvers she looted from a dead royalist—Mustang is already proving to be a bit of a gun hoarder—as a souvenir of her time on Morrow. She's touched. Sarai digs around in the ship's mess and whips up an astonishingly tasty tiramisu from ersatz ingredients. Turns out she's a culinary genius! Roman declines to eat any, creating what will turn out to be an unreasonably long-lived suspicion among certain of his crewmates that he's secretly an android.

In orbit of Betharan III, the crew finds…nothing. They wait a bit, and a stealthy warship of unfamiliar design—the IRIS cruiser Alekhine's Gun—swims up out of the planet's sensor shadow, alarmingly close to their ship, and extends an umbilical to dock with them. After some trepidatious debate, they board the Gun, with Kaji in the lead. A motley group is arrayed to meet them: two officers in unmarked black uniforms, one of whom soon escorts Kaji away; three espatiers in armored vacuum suits, with void carbines; a half-dozen personnel in loose-fitting jumpsuits of several different colors, some carrying toolkits and others dataslabs; and one guy in a short-sleeved button-up, slacks, and a tie. One of the espatiers remains by the umbilical, one goes aboard the PCs' ship with all the jumpsuit-wearers and the tie guy, and one accompanies the second officer as he leads the crew to a wardroom.

The officer politely, nervously, but firmly informs the crew that techs need to sweep the ship and invites them to relax in the Gun's wardroom, where they can chat with him; an aide serves bhujia and the best chai they've had in a long time. The crew don't get much out of the officer, but one of the jumpsuit-wearers eventually comes back and quietly confers with him, and Mustang surreptitiously records the audio of their conversation.

The officer apologizes (in a stuffy British accent): The techs, he says, accidentally “overloaded the axionic confinement conduit, sent a quantum surge through all the starboard collector brackets, and zapped the central computer,” and parts of the computer database were lost. They've managed to restore most of them, he explains, but—and he's terribly sorry—there are a few items they'll need to input manually. He gets a compad from the tie guy, then passes it to Sarai, who has presented herself as the crew's leader.

Their transponder and registry documentation have all been changed. It's obviously still referring to the same ship—same dimensions, same fittings, same maintenance problems—and the crew manifest is the same as before, but the ship is now shown as being owned by some company in the Commonwealth they've never heard of, Lambda ValuDyne; its home port is now registered as Satu Mare, on Rustam (the nearest Commonwealth planet); and it's leased indefinitely to…well, that's one of the blank fields they now need to fill in. Its registration number is different, too, and the “name of vehicle” field is also blank.

The officer prompts the PCs to name their company and rename the ship (which they'd initially named after Sarai's player's trusty old Acura—RIP to a car that carried us all over the Pacific Northwest!). When Sarai tries to just give it the same name, he gently suggests otherwise, noting that, “Unfortunately, there is another ship, physically remarkably similar to, but legally distinct from, this one, which I believe has a registration code ending in those letters, and which goes by that name."

He assures them that if they'll simply “remind” him what the names of the ship and the company are, he can “tidy up all of the details.” He recalls that the players' enterprise, whatever it was called, was a licensed and bonded transport company registered in the Commonwealth, and that if they have any questions, he believes he has the name of their solicitor around here somewhere—she's the same one who represents Lambda ValuDyne. (Is that unusual? No, of course not. Perfectly above-board!) “Ah, yes, here it is, Leila Pak. Do contact her at your earliest convenience.”

Eventually, the players settle on (silly) names: Their ship will henceforth be known as Quora, and their licensed and bonded transport company is Yahoo$.com (with a dollar sign instead of an “s”—write that down). And with that, it's time for the Gun to be on its way. The crew are herded back aboard Quora, and off they go. Payment will process when they're back in Morrow's orbit and can sync with other network nodes. (Commonwealth credits are some kind of crypto-ish digital currency; transactions require at least one third party to verify them—these hazy details are things I promised, back in September or October or whenever this was, to hash out in greater detail. Have I yet? No, of course not.)

Kaji has repaid Mustang's gift generously: she finds an IRIS-issue laser carbine packed up in a neat little case on her bunk (rules-wise, a regular laser rifle, but Enc 1 instead of 2). The rest of the crew wanders around poking at everything on the ship with knives and broomsticks, trying to figure out whether, and where, IRIS bugged them. They find no bugs, but by Quora's reactor manifold, they find that one of the techs left a bottle of aguardiente and a pack of cigarettes in a chalk circle. Batias, BQ, and Krissa drink most of the booze, but add a cookie and a slice of cheesecake to the circle to compensate.

The trip back to Morrow takes only a day; BQ's really getting the hang of piloting this thing (i.e., I've been generous with XP and he's got both ranks of the Starfarer focus now). Roman and Sarai send a message to Leila Pak introducing themselves, asking whether the crew could be of assistance, and inquiring about the status of the lease from Lambda ValuDyne. Everybody listens to Mustang's recording of the conversation between the IRIS officer and tech: Turns out the tech was just telling the officer that their work was done, and the officer was trying to workshop some made-up technobabble about axionic this and quantum that. “Just tell them we wiped the system, changed the registry, and pulled the Milieu's bugs. It's spy shit, they'll understand,” said the bewildered tech. The officer was undeterred.

Elias has a new job lined up for them when they return. He gives them coordinates for a secure landing pad at the Havre; they spend the evening exploring the spaceport a bit: shopping, lining up commodity deals, gambling—Batias and Krissa use the latter's precognitive powers to rip off an operation too small to have a metapsion for a bouncer—and keeping an eye out for potential henchpeople for Sarai, who has taken the Henchkeeper focus. In the morning, Elias sends a vehicle to return them to the Cosmopol, where he'll brief them on this next job.

* * *

I've handled XP as a mix of party progress (everybody gets one XP at the end of every session) and individual goals (everybody sets a short-term and a medium-term goal; one XP for accomplishing the former, two or more for the latter). The steady drip of session-based XP meant that everybody got to level 3 in very short order in terms of in-universe time spent (they've only just completed their first-ever job here, after all).

I might be a little stingier with the XP if I did it over again, but on the other hand, these characters are supposed to be veteran criminals, and I don't mind them heading into their next job being a little tougher and more capable. The default XP curve in SWN also gets very steep fairly quickly; it'll take them a while to get into the middle levels, and then a long time to gain each level past 6 or so.

I realized somewhere in here that I hadn't done enough to give the PCs a shared history or connections with each other, so I started encouraging them to interact with each other, including by having each player come up with five rumors about their character (some true, some not) and then distributing these among the crew. I haven't always leaned on the rumors enough, but they did result in some good character development, they got a few conversations going, and they launched the still-unfolding "Roman is a secret android" theory. (He's not. It's very obvious.)

Next: Chapter 3.