Play date: December 9, 2017
In-game date: April 13 or so, EY219
Location: The planet in the slide points
Previous events: Meeting a flatulent alien race and finding a shiny new toy
While Jillian and Bishop stay in Sunshine's blimp ship with Jillian working on understanding how to calculate a path from any slide point to any other, many of the rest of the crew clamber about in their new alien ship, checking things out. Azar, Ghost, Sheema, and Whang stay on the Steel Hummingbird just in case. Volkova stays outside and mounts attachment points on both ships so that the new one can drag the Hummingbird out of atmosphere. It's hard work to do on your own and she pulls something in her arm when she rushes it to get off this planet sooner rather than later. Such injuries are part and parcel of engineering, she thinks to herself.
Inside the newfound ship Choi shows Malcolm -- and Volkova, when she comes in ruefully rubbing her shoulder -- how things work. Choi's got an ego the size of a skyscraper but she is a genius with xenotech and the other two find it easy to work out what the controls do, even without knowing the language on the labels.
There are two interesting finds: one is a weapons cache consisting of a variety of firearms, armoured suits, grenades, and swords, all of interesting design.
The other find is a cargo bay set up to hold eight small mecha suits. They're fairly small, more like powered armour than real vehicles, but still intriguing. Although the bay's set up for eight there are only two suits still hooked up. Sunshine did mention destroying several of them...
Strangely, there doesn't seem to be any crew compartments (maybe the aliens didn't use them?) and not much in the way of life support or space drive range. This feels like a short-range ship, which probably means that it has a mother ship or support ship somewhere around. Disturbing!
Malcolm gets the atmospheric engines working after a bit of fiddling. He's not worried about burning them out the way he did with the Hummingbird, as this ship landed with no scorch marks on its exterior. When he engages the ship lifts up in the air a bit without the roar of engines that he's used to. It looks like it uses some bizarre anti-gravity device, giving it VTOL capabilities. Cool! He's also dazed by his first experience with a head-up display but adapts quickly enough even without understanding the text floating in front of his eyes.
Volkova finds that the space drive isn't set up for entering slide points -- more evidence that this is a dropship given that they're in the slide points right now -- and makes the necessary modifications to it.
While Malcolm and Volkova are messing around with things they discuss what to call the new ship. Choi suggests calling it after her, something like The Fearsome Choi, but they ignore her and eventually settle on Scorching Raptor. Two of their favourite ships are called the Resplendent Dragon and Steel Hummingbird, so why mess with the success of Adjective Flying_creature?
Up in Sunshine's blimp Bishop is informed that the alien ship his just lifted off a bit. He tells Jillian, who at this point has pretty much worked out from Sunshine's crew how to exit to any known slide point. She's less certain of being consistently able to go to new slide points, but thinks that she can figure out how to do it.
There's seemingly no end to Sunshine's generosity; its blimp ship carries Volkova over to the other wreck that they found, with a functional space drive, wait while she unmounts it, and then airlifts the drive over to the Steel Hummingbird. Volkova takes an afternoon to jury rig the drive into the Hummingbird, working at her usual superhuman speed. While she does so the others spend their time in other productive ways.
Malcolm tries out the various weapons he found in the cache and finds them to be superior to human weapons in pretty much all ways, many of them having special abilities as well as better accuracy and punch. It's an odd collection: some of the firearms fire projectiles, some are beam weapons. The only real problem is holding them comfortably; they're obviously designed for beings whose proportions aren't quite the same as humans'.
Bishop spends his afternoon working out the language on the new ship with Choi's help. The two of them working together with a language that doesn't seem too complicated ends up with them having it mostly settled and figuring out the the ship's abilities. They start taping handwritten translations on many of the controls. The ship is heavily armoured and the three sets of weapons can be fired separately or linked to all fire at the same target, which looks frightening. The weapons have excellent targeting systems and fire encased plasma that seems like it would melt pretty much anything it would hit. It's also designed for speed and maneuverability over range, in space at least. In atmosphere it's basically got the grace of a cow.
Jillian has a productive few hours in the Hummingbird ignoring Volkova's banging around on the space drive and makes a mixed medium art piece for Sunshine representing human-ness. It's an oil painting with beans, pasta, and glitter added to emphasize love or happiness or under-appreciated genius or something. Surprisingly, it's ok to human eyes and sensibilities even if it's generally incomprehensible without a long description of what the different bean types represent (they mostly represent the juxtaposition of emotion and the baseness of the physical body).
Once Volkova's got the space drive installed in her ship Malcolm flies the Scorching Raptor to the Hummingbird and loads the gun cache onto his ship while cackling. Bishop reveals that he's found out that the Raptor has a computer, which disturbs everyone. Human computers are room-sized things that can only do calculations. The Iof's computer (which everyone now admits is the "brain" that the Grob talked about) tried to kill the Grob when they tried it out. This seems to be the smaller, more complicated sort of computer and it's on a violent species' ship.
They decide to give the computer a go. Bishop, Choi, Jillian, Malcolm, and Volkova put on EVA suits just in case and take up stations in the Raptor while everyone else goes to the Hummingbird. Volkova works out how to (hopefully) pull the plug on the computer if necessary. The blimps are informed of what's going on -- they don't really have much experience with computers either, as most of their technology is grown -- and the blimp backs off, keeping a wary eye on the proceedings.
There's a text interface with the computer and not knowing how to speak the language it's how they begin to communicate with it. It's slow going for a bit, working out translations on the fly, but suddenly there's a bizarre voice on the bridge: the computer can speak! Worryingly, it's also worked out human language by listening to them and has done a decent enough job of it. It insists that the captain wants a situation report and Bishop isn't able to make much headway towards getting it to do his bidding. In the end Volkova successfully disconnects the computer. At least it didn't (yet?) try to kill them!
It's time to leave this high-gravity nightmare and see if Aiscapo has been cleared of the D'vor or is a series of burned husks of planets. Malcolm carefully lands the Raptor on top of the Hummingbird and Volkova gets to work lashing them together. Bishop and Jillian put on respirators and say their farewells to Sunshine in person. There are a few official things to do, like setting up a frequency for communicating if the humans come back, and a personal thing as well, presenting Jillian's art piece. Sunshine accepts it with gratitude, seeming to actually enjoy it, and hands Jillian a lumpy, bulbous "plant" in return. She's dubious, but finally assured that it doesn't move. It looks like something forgotten at the back of the refrigerator for a few months but Jillian's hardly one to refuse a gift for aesthetic reasons. She and Bishop thank Sunshine and return to the Hummingbird, where she has Bishop test if the "plant" is dangerous or not. He's lost his terrarium/medical bay but still has a few slugs for first-aid purposes. The plant is ugly but harmless, and once she's removed her respirator and placed it in her room Jillian finds that it's got a pleasant musky scent.
Finally: liftoff! Malcolm pilots the Raptor, where Volkova's on sensors, Bishop's on weapons, and Choi is in engineering. Everyone else is in the Hummingbird, with Jillian notably on sensors. The Raptor isn't designed for heavy lifting and she's not happy carrying the Hummingbird in this gravity but Malcolm convinces her to make it to orbit, where he can switch to the space drive. It's still a lot to carry and the controls are a bit sluggish even in space, but things go well. Jillian works out the coordinates for getting to Piccadilly, where the Resplendent Dragon will hopefully be waiting. It's hard to work out how much time they've spent here with the bizarre readings, but everyone hopes that they haven't been gone for twenty years or anything that ridiculous.
Breaking orbit and heading for Jillian's coordinates they are unpleasantly unsurprised when a large ship detects them and hails them, closing on their position. Their ship indeed seems to have come from another, larger ship. Bishop gets a translation of their message -- sent in text as well as incomprehensible voice communication -- and they're asking for what's going on. Bishop responds in text, claiming that the self-destruct has accidentally been activated, so stay away, and entering a false direction for where they're going.
Malcolm's been continuing to the slide point exit this whole time. When Bishop admits that he's unable to convince the larger ship to leave them alone -- the larger ship is releasing a few dozen very small craft that are also heading towards them -- Malcolm kicks the space drive into high and pushes for speed, hoping to leave the other ship behind. He knows that the Raptor is even faster than the Hummingbird, after all. The two ships drag race through the swirling madness that is the slide points, but Malcolm is unable to pull away from their pursuer even if he leaves the numerous smaller craft behind. He redlines the space drive and Choi in engineering frantically calls up that things look like they're going to burn out or explode -- space drives really aren't her strong suit and she's not sure how to keep things under control. Volkova heads down to engineering to provide some extra speed and prevent any exploding.
As much as he pushes it, Malcolm just can't get away from the other ship, which continues to close on the Raptorbird. Some of this might be the result of the drag of the Hummingbird but he has to admit that the pilot on the other ship is good. Very good. When the larger craft starts to fire a few warning shots with its powerful weapons he has to give up; he doesn't see a way to win this, and so he slows down and stops the ship while Bishop texts their surrender.
Jillian gets Azar, Sheema, and Whang into the larger hidden compartment in the Hummingbird before she climbs into the Raptor. The larger alien ship pulls up to the Raptor and extends an umbilical. The sound of it attaching is ominous. The crew decides to meet the aliens unarmed: knowing what they know of the alien weapons a close-quarters firefight would be a massacre and this might not need to end in a fight, right? Right?
The hatch opens and four aliens step through. They are humanoid, shorter than humans on average. Their skin is smooth and pale blue with darker blue patches. They have an extra thumb opposite the "normal" one, but the most disturbing trait is their large faceted eyes. There's no denying that despite their alien look they are mysterious attractive. The boarding party is wearing body armour and holding the same sort of weapons that Malcolm took off of the ship and that he knows are quite lethal.
There is a bit of incomprehensible chatter between the two sides before the slightly off sound of the computer's voice starts running translation -- the aliens have small radios or something similar that lets the computer from the larger ship do its work. It's not quite an instantaneous translation and the talk is stilted, but Jillian gives a pretty accurate description of their experiences on the planet, minus anything having to do with Sunshine. She claims that they just found the ship abandoned, which is true. All her lying is by omission.
The alien captain shows up once it's pretty certain that the situation is safe. Given that several of their crew died on the surface and these humans tried to steal their ship, the aliens (who call themselves the Aerikin) are pretty laid back and friendly. The captain chalks up their losses on the surface as due to incompetence and asks his doctor to thaw out another batch of cadets, and to this time try to get a better batch. Jillian gets the ominous feeling that they see themselves as a generally superior species, but Bishop becomes instant friends with the Aerikin captain.
Jillian and her crew don't seem very threatening to the Aerikin, which may or may not be a good thing, and they are invited onto the larger ship. It's just as intimidatingly high tech as their smaller dropship and has a fair-sized crew, at least fifteen as far as the humans can tell them apart. There are also a few three metre-long iridescent centipede-like creatures creeping up the walls here and there which the Aerikin treat as pets.
Bishop can't find the Song on any of the aliens and they're happy to let the humans wander their ship escorted as long as they can do the same on the Steel Hummingbird. The humans aren't really in any position to argue and the aliens seem to have very good sensors: they detect the humans in the hidden compartment, who are released. There are the usual comments about Volkova's approach to maintenance and a slight condescension towards the Hummingbird and human technology as the aliens wander around.
It seems that the aliens discovered space drive technology by finding it, the same way that everyone has, but don't have jump drives and have only found out about the slide points recently. This is an exploratory ship, the first to try its hand in the slide points. The Aerikin are curious about the rest of the galaxy and Jillian allows them to analyze their wire recordings of their travels, though it's the version that's had the recordings turned off for all of their dodgy travels.
When the Aerikin find out about the D'vor they immediately offer to help humans in their struggle without particularly knowing much about the details. They seem to think that the D'vor won't be too much of a challenge. Jillian finds this off-putting.
Everyone pairs up with their equivalent on the alien ship and they exchange knowledge, though not everything. Malcolm and the pilot hit it off and he's pleased to hear that catching the Raptor wasn't an easy job for the Aerikin; their engines were pushed to the breaking point the same way that his were. When the missing weapons cache on the Raptor is brought up he unconvincingly plays dumb but surprisingly the aliens don't really care.
Jillian uses the Aerikin's computer to quickly calculate the exit point to the small smart worm system, one that's been taken over by the D'vor, and tells the Aerikin that's where they're going. She really doesn't trust these aliens and worries that their superior attitude will lead them to invade human space. If they're so convinced that the D'vor will be pushovers why not let them have some experiences with them far away from humans?
Bishop has a totally different attitude towards his new friends and tells them about the Dreaming and many other things besides. He also encourages them to visit human systems, which Jillian doesn't overhear.
Choi, meanwhile, wanders around like a kid in a candy store, totally in love with these aliens and their technology. She didn't really get into the organic technology that Sunshine had but this stuff is amazing.
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Bishop's Bedpost Notch Count: 1, somehow (running total: 35)
Jillian's Bedpost Notch Count: 0 (running total: 5.5)
Malcolm's Bedpost Notch Count: 0 (running total: 16)
Volkova's Bedpost Notch Count: 0 (running total: 7)