Discovering the Diligent

Coming Home

While going about their typical(?) business, they encounter “Sketchy” Gray, a local artist who ekes out a living selling paintings, who looks very out of sorts — He hasn’t slept in too long, and is actively making eye-contact with pretty much everyone, just a bit too emphatically to just be trying to get attention and sell some of his art. He’s also publicly criticizing the company, and starting to draw what will almost certainly be unwanted (and maybe dangerous) attention from nearby company security. In a borderline rant, he proclaims that the company owns everything and everyone.

In an effort to calm him down, Casper, with some financial help from Chase, buys one of Sketchy’s pieces, a well-executed but not terribly remarkable scene. At first Sketchy seems startled by the choice they make, but eventually sells it, and starts to calm down almost immediately.

Most of the characters move along to Parallax, the bar that Casper… Owns? The relationship isn’t completely clear yet. Grax, however, stays behind to keep an eye on Sketchy, at least for a bit, having scented that he’s been running on adrenaline for too long. Sketchy continues to calm down more, and is preparing to “close up” for the day — and hopefully get some much-needed sleep — with some additional sales prompted by Chase’s social media posting about Sketchy’s art grabbing a lot of attention and a few additional sales. As Sketchy is putting his unsold art away for the night, he gets some apparent assistance from occasional passers-by. Grax continues to watch for a while, but while a brief, noisy distraction takes her attention away from Sketchy, the most recent person assisting him knifes him in the chest for reasons unknown.

Grax immediately sends a quick distress-call for Ebony Moon/Garb, who elected to stay on the ship even while work was going on, and to the other characters, then takes the assailant down. She avoids killing him, but still puts him very solidly out. Ebony Moon/Garb heals Sketchy after some thinking about how best to deal with it,leaving him unconscious still, but stable. Grax gathers up both Sketchy and his assailant, and takes them, with Ebony Moon/Garb in tow, back to Parallax.

After a lot of random digging into various things around the attack, the assailant is identified as Lucas Kelly — a local mining-machinery operator, with a security record of violent altercations with… well, all sorts of folks, really. The characters also find a PMU (portable memory unit) hidden in the painting that Casper bought from Sketchy.

Though the motivations for the attack aren’t clear yet, the best guess seems to be that Kelly was supposed to get the PMU off of Sketchy’s painting, but when that painting wasn’t available, he was going to fail in that mission, lost his temper, and took it out on Sketchy.

Examination of the PMU’s contents, which involved borrowing a higher-powered computer from one of Cerys’ contacts, leads to the conclusion that it’s a fairly sizable encrypted message, which looks like it’s been encrypted with a digital one-time pad of some sort.

After healing, waking, and interrogating Lucas Kelly, he admits that he was sent to recover the PMU (maybe buying the painting, maybe not; that’s not clear) by one Riley Atkinson. Tracking her down, she’s been flagged by Hepæstus security as a possible Ludlow member.

Digging for More Information

TODO: Pick players' brains re: what happened in this session, document it.