Moon's Haunted/Session 2

Gathered aboard *La Petite Mort*, the party prepared to begin experimentation on Renata. Macabeau agreed to offer her tools, with caveats in favor of Renata’s life. In perhaps a ploy, however, whatever had controlled Renata temporarily released its grip, leaving the party with a confused and terrified civilian. Coolly ignoring her cries, the party sedated her and prepared her for surgery—but upon Larsen’s first cut into her black masses, the bestial Renata woke up and began to struggle and howl desperately, screaming with gaps in the sound that seemed to some like a radio cutting in and out (but to others, of course, the silences were filled.) As Larsen continued to cut, Renata’s secret was revealed: a large spider, of perhaps 1m in size and legs of 0.5m in length, had somehow gotten inside her, latched along her spine, and wrapped its legs inside of her in the hydraulic "death curl."

Various tests were run on the exposed spider’s back. It was quite clear that it was parasitically feeding upon Renata’s etheric energy, drawing it slowly out of her body. It also was able to control Renata’s nervous system. The effort to etherically scan the distressed Renata/spider nearly broke de Vranne’s device, though it eventually (and perhaps for the worse) learned to process the information, leaving de Vranne with a seismograph of its changes in energy. Though sound did not appear to affect it, deaf as it was without a spider's usual sensory hairs, it greedily consumed the etheric energy aimed by Grandma Lockheart’s strange projection device—and indeed, briefly forced a two-way connection that dialed up the intensity higher than Lockheart had selected. This “adrenaline shot” of energy enabled the spider ‘s back legs to burst outward from Renata’s ribcage. Dozir was brought in briefly to confirm that this was the same kind of creature he had seen—he had just enough time to say so, and add that the one in Renata looked smaller, before he was forced to flee the room in abject horror and nausea.

Despite Eleanor’s assessment that Renata’s body, though perhaps not mind, could be saved, the party resolved there was little else that could be done in their mission timeframe and decided to kill Renata to see what would happen. Macabeau and O'Clery were disgusted, but could do little to sway Kesdis from allowing de Vranne to approach Renata, pistol drawn. However, seeming to sense the imminent death of its host, the spider hurriedly sapped the last of Renata’s energy and used the jolt to begin to emerge and fight. In a hail of gunfire, the party destroyed it.

The party released Larsen and finally set out for Kamens, running final tests on the corpse along the way. The spider was made of some sinewy organic material, but none knew what—indeed, it was missing many of the normal organs a spider might have, appearing instead to be a simple, dark mass. Grandma Lockheart noted that it smelt of some kind of old Celestial religious offerings, but not to any god she had ever studied. Questioning how the spider might have entered Renata, Lockheart also noted that in some particularly invasive possessions by angels, the angel’s aspect "steps into" its host—Lockheart thought it feasible that the spider had simply phased into Renata in the same way. Autopsy confirmed that there were no signs of entrance trauma in Renata’s body. The party kicked the corpse out the airlock and prepared for landing.

Unfortunately, a brief etheric blackout enveloped *La Petite Mort* as it grew closer to Kamens, interfering with the engines. The ship’s pilots compensated poorly, crash-landing the ship onto Kamens’ surface and wholly shearing off one of the ship’s engines. The party found itself stranded on the lip of the crater containing the ATC’s mining operation on Kamens, a few steps from where the operation’s abandoned freighters were parked. As the party surveyed its situation, Rimm noticed a few short humanoids seem to pop up from behind a ridgeline, observe the party, and pop back down. With only seven hours of daylight to use, the party split up: hoping to get a read on the area, Dozir and Nolwen the sniper ascended the crag, a protrusion from the lip of the crater a few hundred meters high which had likely been some feature of the landscape sheared when the crater was made. O’Clery, de Vranne, Lockheart and Abbey went to seek replacement parts for the ship’s engine from the abandoned ATC freighters nearby. Eleanor and Moirin stayed with the ship, setting traps. The rest of the party set out to investigate the small humanoids.

Dozir and Nolwen observed little in the landscape from the top of the crag. The outpost building at the summit was a different story, however. The office had obviously been the site of a melee, with a blood trail leading out and onto the elevator. The two found the log of one McClure, who had apparently been the alternate shift partner of watchman Pike. Though Pike had held the day shift, McClure had worked the 12-hour shift which was entirely comprised of Kamens’ long night cycle, and in the process had apparently seen terrible things—things he had not told Pike, at first to keep Pike from thinking he was crazy, and then to protect Pike from the awful knowledge. Many nights he had seen the small humanoids stilly observe the ATC installation from along the ridgeline, only to disappear into the ground. More alarming, he noted that the crater-crystals many had told of were not actually crystals at all, but actually light hitting great webs along the insides of Kamens’ other craters. These great webs contained gigantic spiders. Noting that the graveyard of Celestial and Perfect Prince ships further back in the landscape contained, in many cases, ships crash-landed inside craters, McClure intuited that the ships had perhaps tried to land in the craters (as they made flat LZs and were good landmarks) and become caught in the webs. It was unclear if this was the cunning hunter’s intelligence of the huge spiders. McClure prayed it was not. The log ended the day before the final rotation’s evacuation without incident (if, of course, the above can be considered normal.)

Meanwhile, on the ground, the team of four investigated the abandoned freighters. As these had been used mostly to move equipment, and had not been part of the final wave’s evacuation, there was little of human interest inside them. Finding one in especially good shape, Lockheart triaged its systems, finding all to be perfect except for a "foreign object" in one of the engines. Investigating, de Vranne and O’Clery discovered the source—one of the great spiders, nesting in the external thruster shielding of the ship. Not wanting to damage the engine with gunfire, de Vranne lured it out with an etheric pulse while O’Clery crouched to the side with her shotgun, preparing to ambush. As the horrific arachnid slowly uncurled and stepped out of the thruster, revealing its size one 3-meter-long leg at a time, de Vranne lost his nerve entirely. White as a sheet and seemingly about to flee, de Vranne was deeply relieved to see O’Clery entirely shred off the left four of the beast’s legs with a shotgun blast—though made uncomfortable with the revelation that it had still not been killed outright. Taking out his embarrassment, de Vranne sawed its thorax in half with machine gun fire, executing it. The spider had been caching the webbed-up corpses of ATC miners in the back of the engine, which the team buried properly. Afterwards, all noted de Vranne dart to an emergency therapy session with Macabeau, Lockheart barely stifling a laugh. The remainder of the team determined that the freighter was in better shape and better equipped than *La Petite Mort* and reestablished its base of operations within.

Kesdis’ away team reached the top of the ridgeline, getting a view of the ship graveyard as it sought the small humanoids. Rimm realized that they had possibly been emerging from, and disappearing into, sheer and narrow vents in the ground. As the team investigated, le Fou tripped and got his leg caught in one of the vents; in horror, the team listened as a humanoid scampered up the walls of the vent and grabbed onto le Fou’s foot, trying to pull him down. It lost its grip, though, and Rimm listened as the figure moaned and swore as it fell back down, surmising that it spoke some pidgin of Celestial. Rimm shouted “peace!” back down after it in the same language before searching around the vents. The team discovered a few things of note: first, the vents’ walls were streaked with blood and lacked real hand-holds, and there were a few fingernails at the top, which Rimm took for study. This seemed to imply that the figures were climbing the walls the same way as the possessed on Nocturne could. Second, a shell casing was found near the edge, as though a rifle had been shot from the vent and implying the humanoids were armed and sniping. Finally, the team discovered tracks indicating that the figures had, at some point, circled around the lip of the ATC installation’s crater, slid down it, and then climbed back up—potentially meaning the humanoids had previously been spying on, or even infiltrating, the installation. Rimm tore a page from le Fou’s notebook, writing "peace?" and leaving it and a pencil near the exterior of one of the vents before departing.

Gathering back together and reporting each other’s findings, the party prepared to settle in for its first night on Kamens…