Driftwood/Session 5

We're finally headed back to Tarim. But this time, we're not stopping at the run-down hovel most of us got piss drunk at. No, this time, we're going to Tarim proper and hitting up the main port city. Ideally, we can heal up, sell off our cargo, and get back to work. As QS and SQ make clear: time is money, so we're headed back full speed. However, that doesn't preclude us from various shenanigans on the way:
*Darius holds "religious practices" in his quarters (his term for getting high enough to see the gods, apparently).
*Zeta practices some cool ninja moves with her knife hands now that she doesn't have to hide them. She invites the rest of the crew to join her, and Ossirc actively expresses his disinterest, opting instead to assess the ship's structural integrity.
*Tog plans to do "drugs du jour" with Darius, but first he decides he wants to search the ship for something fun. He moves to extort the prisoners by putting in a "good word" for them to Captain Georg but offers nothing concrete in the way of helping them. None of the new mooks that work for us have anything interesting, but he stumbles on to an old salt who offers him something so good that "anything he's ever had will seem like a junior mint" in comparison. All he wants in exchange is a forged POW document claiming he was stationed on an anti-Shantine vessel.
Tog listens intently to the old man's request and responds in kind by blasting a hole in his chest cavity with a hydrogen pistol. The old man looks mildly offended as he collapses and dies. The marines, who are under the impression that Tog is Georg's cabin boy, order him to justify what he just did. Tog lies about the old man carrying weapons and needing to search the body, which they somehow believe. He searches the old man's hollow mechanical legs, finding nothing, and mangles them in the process.
Tog decides, after all that, to drag the legs over to Fritz's quarters. He gets the legs ready to move, failing to notice the two prisoners attacking him. One of them takes the key away to unlock their cuffs, and the other chokes him with their chains and uses him as a human shield. The freed prisoner grabs his gun and threatens to start shooting.
Overhearing the commotion, Georg and Ossirc make it to the scene and clock the situation. Georg shoots the prisoner who stole Tog's gun. Ossirc whispers to the marine guards asking if we can "shoot the hostage for being incompetent." One of the guards empties his clip full auto and kills the armed prisoner, somehow not hitting Tog in the process. The other prisoner grabs the pistol, threatening to shoot everyone in the room, and then himself.
Georg, deciding it's time for a distraction, asks the prisoner what he wants. He asks for a ship and an aether suit. He'll escape in the ship, taking Tog as a hostage, then once he gets a day away, he'll push Tog out in the suit so we can pick him up. Georg circles him, not impressed. He claims he doesn't even know Tog, which the prisoner doesn't believe for a second.
During this distraction, Zeta drops her camouflage and stabs the prisoner in the throat with her knife hands. This must have been a butter knife because it didn't incapacitate him. He looks around in surprise, trying and failing to catch sight of who stabbed him. He then tries to shoot Tog in the face, missing badly.
Georg has had enough. He tries to talk the prisoner down by saying his life is forfeit regardless of whether Tog lives or dies, and his only chance to survive is to surrender. This fails horribly. Zeta tries to stab again, but misses. The prisoner manages to shoot Tog in the head, but only grazes him.
Fritz finally makes it to the scene. He psionically pushes the prisoner's gun hand away from Tog, holding it back. Given an opening, Tog tries to subdue the prisoner, but only manages to thrash around a bit. Georg shoots the prisoner in the arm, blowing it off and knocking him out. Unfortunately, the shots he missed ended up hitting Tog, causing serious soft tissue damage, and blowing off his ear and eye. Fritz stabilizes Tog, letting the prisoner bleed out.
Darius is smoking some sort of Dalthadi elixir in his quarters.
Ossirc opts to "violently assault the most dysfunctional part of the ship with a wrench," but then changes his mind and instead tries to improve the old man's mechanical legs.
Ossirc and Fritz have a back and forth about the drugs hidden inside the hollow bits of the legs. Fritz insists on analyzing the bags, and Ossirc threatens to shoot Fritz if he doesn't leave. Georg arrives and tells Fritz he's being unreasonable and needs to leave. Ossirc puts the drugs in his toolbox and fixes up the legs by utilizing the hollow space more effectively and adding mass to them. Georg asks Ossirc to sweep the ship for trackers, but Ossirc has already done that, so he instead orders preparation for potential boarding actions.
Georg takes the recovered Shantine documents to Darius to study them. The effects of the drugs allow Darius to commune with old friends to understand what he's reading. Among the documents, he finds a cipher to a Shantine codebook, which will let us signal to any ships not in contact with Shantine command. He notices this ship (The Fugitive, name pending) has had multiple name changes and was once part of the Grand Celestial Fleet, giving us another potential avenue for a cover story.
Moreover, Darius finds navigation charts, but he's not able to make out what he's reading. Fulton could, but he's resting up from his own massive injuries. He can at least determine that something odd happened to the Shantine fleet that this ship was part of. That fleet was engaged around 10 days ago and made a hasty retreat, but the Fugitive managed to get separated around the same time, even though it was extremely far from everyone else. Darius points this out to Georg and the idea of weird time dilation effects get brought up.
Job has been absent from the commotion so far… what's he been doing? Apparently, he spent time talking with his soul computer wife and didn't clock the initial gunfire as real. Eventually he realizes what's happening, and he wanders for a bit before running into Georg and Darius. Darius repeats his findings to Job. This is the dog whistle Job needed, as he gets help from his "wife" to calculate out a theory about what happened to the ship. He starts rambling on about how the Shantine never retreated, they simply opened a hole to a higher dimensional space and traversed over the aether to make a move on the Celestial Fleet. Georg has seen something like this happen (the Underside), so he believes what Job's saying could be true, but he's not sure if that's what's going on.
Job explains the Underside theory to Georg in "golden retriever" terms (cue Air Bud reference), and Georg thinks we should send this information up the chain of command to find out if it's real. Job is insistent we do no such thing, instead taking the initiative and following the path he believes the ship to have taken, possibly changing the course of the war. Darius, for his part, is hesitant to defy QS and SQ, as leaving to explore this would be seen as mutiny since we don't own the ship outright. The debate between Job and Georg heats up a bit before Georg pulls rank and says we can't take the risk. We have no way of knowing where we'll end up, or how our allies would be able to contact us. Job is disappointed but relents and goes back to his quarters.
We finally reach Tarim and get a bit of desperately needed shore leave. As we're working under the Carcosa, our ship is impounded so we can't leave until they do, so we might as well blow off some steam. There's a large Brass Cities influence here, and the relationship is tenuous, but cordial enough to bolster the fleet with Brass Cities ships. Tarim is also relatively displeased working in tandem with Aeldrum, but individual interests aside, their goals line up enough to overlook the smaller gripes… for now. To be safe, though, it's best to stay in the Fialta quarters of the city.
Georg orders Job (the insane person) to deliver copies of the intel up the chain of command. This can only end well. Thankfully, before that, we go to get healed up. Aside from the normal hospitals in the area, there's a bootleg district called "Surgeon's Row" that can patch us up quickly given enough cash. It even has an area in the back for cadaver donations, lovingly referred to as the "sluiceway". It's not just medical services, though, there are more… esoteric treatments, from electroshock therapy to "restorative prostitution," whatever that means. (Drakr is very interested in the esoteric services.)
Ossirc stresses he's the curmudgeon who's staying on the ship.
Georg sends Darius to procure some weapons. This doesn't go well. His search leads him to a totally legit operation run out of a barge under a bridge. When reporting his findings, Georg insists we go more name brand, despite the extra cost. The equipment Georg wants will cost around 15,000 ducats. The quartermaster has set up a credit line against the ship for 50,000 ducats to cover things like this.
When we arrive at Surgeon's Row, the first thing we notice is how well it seems to be run. The individual areas are heavily soundproofed, and medical professionals are running around offering services and business cards alike. Fritz takes the corpses to the sluiceway and meets Doctor Mike, who assesses the condition of the bodies before handing them over to an automaton named Angus to process them. Fritz likes Angus for some reason. In exchange for the donations, Fritz is offered an account with the Organ Works Consortium, which will let us bump ourselves up waitlists for any procedures that need done.
Back in the main area of Surgeon's Row, we decide that Job's mental state is the highest priority. Of the doctors that approach us, one offers to work on Georg's arm, but he defers to Job. She asks us about Job's mental state, and Job responds that he's "always been this way, only now it's stronger and has more emotional emphasis." She clocks him as a nutcase and recommends neurological reconstruction (brain tissue grafting), as well as setting up a subscription for brain scanning (for easier remapping of the mind). Job offers up his "wife" as a brain scan donor, which she finds to be extremely weird, as personal soul computers are frowned upon around here. As she leads Job to a clinic, a gray-skinned, charming doctor type gives Job a business card and offers to take him up on the soul computer idea…
Category:Session Summaries