Session 3

Date: May 16, 2010

Game Date: August 2nd, EY217

Location: The Ashram, orbiting Shiva

Events: Intimidation, first dates, firearms, and forty thousand lesbians

With the repairs to the Steel Hummingbird almost completed, it's time to prepare to drop off the load of pipes in the cargo hold. There is a problem, in that about a tenth of the pipes have been damaged in the collision, but hopefully Mr. Adraghand, the recipient, will understand.

The two prostitutes who are going to be taken back to Kali are Zanani and Roneet. Omang, the lone male prostitute, won't be coming. Zanani is an iZu name, and Bishop is intrigued. He finds out which room in The Ashram's hotel is hers, and talks to her, pretending to not know her line of work and claiming to just want to talk to someone with a similar background. She's on call, as it were, and won't be free until two in the morning. Bishop is willing to wait.

The rest of the crew spend the night playing gin rummy while drinking gin and rum. At long last 2 am comes around and Bishop heads off to see and hopefully seduce Zanani. She's expecting him and is dressed well, but nothing too provocative. The big surprise is that she's the "wife" from Bishop's dream the night before! Bishop is dressed to the nines, though he generally is, and brings Ubuntu tea as a gift. She isn't just culturally iZu but from Ubuntu as well, and is happy to talk to someone from home. He's up front about being on the ship that's going to bring her to Kali but still pretends to be ignorant about prostitution, the better to bed her. He's charming, buys her drinks, and tells her about his dream, but she's not going to rush into bed with him. The dream intrigues her and she does seem somewhat interested, but she's been around the block enough that she pretty much sees him as scheming for a freebie. Finally giving up, Bishop returns to the Steel Hummingbird, distraught. The night was wasted, and he's now convinced that he's on a losing streak!

The next morning sees repairs coming to an end. Volkova is staring at the repair crew, intimidating them, the whole while. There is some commotion when a mummified hand is found behind a panel. None of the engineers that Jillian and Malcolm can think of lost a hand; perhaps it's been there since before Malcolm was given the ship. Bishop thinks it may be part of a curse, as they do on uBuntu. Volkova gives the hand a quick lick to satisfy her curiosity about what a mummified hand tastes like and then puts it in a plastic bag, helpfully labelling it "hand". The bag is placed in a drawer in the med bay.

Repairs in the home stretch, it's time to make arrangements with Mr. Adraghand for delivery. Jillian calls him, and he's understandably upset. He won't discuss details over the phone, but will talk to them once he's had a look at the pipes. He gives them the location of his construction site on the surface of Shiva, at the edge of Bhophur, the main city. Even before Jillian calls Mr. Adraghand, Bishop has taken yet another shuttle to the surface, this time in a bid to break his "losing streak" of one rejection. He finds a twenty-two hour bar and throws himself at whoever is still around this morning. Happily for him, he snaps his losing streak in style, managing a threesome with two women whose names he forgets. He takes the light rail system to rejoin the crew at Mr. Adraghand's construction site. They fly the newly-fixed Steel Hummingbird down, taking an indirect route: the Big Sky corporation is serious about keeping its vertical integration near monopoly on planets that it terraforms, and this is obviously not an above-board delivery. They land at just about the same time that Bishop's train pulls in, and Bishop, Jillian, and Volkova enter the construction site together. Malcolm stays behind, drinking a beer on the hull of the Hummingbird.

Things on the site are looking lax, with workers chatting and smoking and construction equipment sitting idle. Perhaps they're waiting for something to be delivered? The crew is directed to Mr. Adraghand's trailer, where it's immediately obvious that he's both upset and a pretty shady character, wearing aviator sunglasses indoors and having a generally oily feel to him. His two burly thugs in the room don't help the crew's impression of him any. This is the first time that the crew of the Steel Hummingbird has met him; the job was taken after speaking with the seller. The talk doesn't go well; the crew haven't come up with any real strategy, and Jillian quickly reveals herself to be an astonishingly poor negotiator. Mr. Adraghand sends one of his interchangeable thugs to the ship with two construction workers to investigate the pipes. Malcolm reluctantly lets them in, and the thug proceeds to wander through the ship after intimidating Malcolm.

Mr. Adraghand makes them an offer. They can accept half the agreed-upon cost for damaged pipes delivered late or deliver an "object" for him. They refuse the delivery option, as it seems too suspicious. Once the pipes have been offloaded and a piddling amount of money changes hands, the Steel Hummingbird flees the construction site. Malcolm decides that he wants a firearm, and they land at the spaceport in Bhophur (paying the inevitable feee for doing so). Malcolm gets a knife and pistol, Jillian a shotgun (a fairly safe longarm to fire inside a ship, if it comes to that) and a knife as well. Volkova is satisfied with her beloved Khnuta, and Bishop goes unarmed, as always. The meeting with Mr. Adraghand has disturbed the crew enough that they decide to search the ship for anything that may have been planted on board. Sure enough, they find a short-range tracking device hidden in the city model in the mess room. Bishop disposes of the device into a passing truck, and the Steel Hummingbird takes off for The Ashram once again.

On The Ashram, Jillian tries to find out more about Mr. Adraghand, but he's either a small enough fish or The Ashram is disconnected enough from the goings-on on Shiva that no one has heard of him. Everyone's tired enough to not do too much for the rest of the day. Bishop sets up a couple of cots and curtains for privacy in the now-empty hold, but that's about it.

Early the next day Zanani and Roneet show up. They find the sparse quarters perfectly acceptable for the short trip, and the Steel Hummingbird takes off for Kali, everyone happy to see the end of the endless costs and bureaucracy of the Big Sky corporation. The trip takes three uneventful days. Bishop continues his attempts to woo Zanani, but Roneet runs interference with practiced ease, and on the second day Zanani has finally had enough and complains to Jillian. Bishop is given a talking to and backs down.

Approaching Kali, Jillian detects something on her sensors. It's at the edge of Kali's faint ring system, and difficult to make out, but soon starts heading towards them. Before they get a good visual on it, it launches two fighters! Could it be the pirates that the Resplendent Dragon mentioned? They didn't say anything about fighters. Malcolm quickly zooms away from them in a vector parallel to the planet, running the engines hot and using the ship's afterburners to gain distance. Volkova mans the ship's gun. She's unlikely to be able to do much damage if the attackers get close, but takes a shot anyway to get an image through the gun camera. Malcolm pulls away from the fighters enough to pilot the Hummingbird into Kali's atmosphere before they get a firing resolution; most ships can't fly in both space and atmosphere, and the small fighters are very unlikely to be able to do so. They apparently can't, and the Hummingbird is safe. As they sail through the yellowy-green atmosphere of Kali, Jillian analyses the sensor readings and comes to the conclusion that the mystery ship that launched the fighters was stealthy, something that is usually found on in military ships; it's certainly illegal in civilian ships.

Coming in for a landing, the size and shape of Labrys City, their destination on Kali, can finally be seen. Labrys City is a huge lesbian separatist colony, its population numbering around forty thousand. It has two giant domes, partially overlapping; each dome, on the same side, is a large "plus"-shaped structure. These structures hold, at least in part, the hangars, and the crew is happy to see that there is no landing fee. The landing goes well and Zanani and Roneet gather their things and leave the ship, accompanied by Jillian and Volkova. Malcolm and Bishop are told to stay on the ship. Malcolm is resigned to this, but Bishop wonders why all these women are lesbians and if they just need some help to come around, but seeing as any man found in Labrys City is sent out into the toxic atmosphere of the planet, he remains on the ship. The interior of Labrys City is definitely lived-in, but holding up well. Volkova is pleased to see that it's not fussily clean.