Moon's Haunted/Session 6

Freighter now full to the brim with party members, traumatized miners, and alien occultists, the party took stock of its situation. Major Kesdis opened by sitting down the party and reminding them all that SHE was in charge, chastising the away team for agreeing to kill a lesser god and bringing back twenty extra mouths without her concurrence. Her point taken, she noted that Belle had been drinking a lot more recently, and ordered her to see Eleanor about it. Belle sullenly responded that the miners had been looking for Kesdis.

Kesdis met the remaining ten miners in their quarters on the freighter. The miners were furious at the arrival of the Vakhtangians, who they saw as little more than dangerous alien savages. Somehow, they knew about the violent flaying and possession ritual that the Vakhtangians practiced for premonition (though it was unclear who had told them, from the away party or otherwise.) Perhaps rightly, the miners feared they would just be fodder for this ritual at the Vakhtangians’ hands, and absolutely refused to be housed anywhere near them, let alone have rations from the freighter’s pool be used to feed them instead. As Kesdis attempted to assuage their fears, the miners dropped another bombshell of information which they should have had no knowledge of: though the party was already looking for Dr. Gant for information about the threat, the miners accused Kesdis herself of having been secretly tasked to extract Gant to safety. The miners threatened that if Gant was still alive, they would not allow Gant anywhere near them, nor allow the party to use the remaining rations to feed him. The miners asked Kesdis simply who she would rather help: them, or an insane war criminal and a bunch of alien executioners she plucked from underground.

Kesdis, shocked and wondering how the miners could know about the ritual or about her objective with Gant, passed the latter off as simply “selling him back to our employer”: not quite believing her and fed up, the miners demanded that they be given a week’s rations and to be allowed to leave the ship with them to go their own way, no longer feeling safe aboard. With one more desperate hope of avoiding conflict, Kesdis reminded them that they would be making it harder for the party itself to survive and therefore stop the threat, and asked them what conditions they would need in order to stay. The miners asked a few things: to be given double rations over the Vakhtangians; to be housed separately from the Vakhtangians and Gant, if he was still alive; the right to arm themselves, starting with the remaining pistols in the hold; and priority of keeping new weaponry found over the Vakhtangians.

Not finding anything particularly problematic in these, Kesdis decided to concede to each of the demands, and tasked De Vranne with clearing out one of the other freighters in the abandoned LZ to keep the hunters in. De Vranne stormed off, angry at both missing the chance to enforce discipline on the mutineers and being given a menial task as a direct result of their disloyalty. As he left, Gaston looked up from writing about the encounter in his notes, with a bit of a glint in his eye; moments later, McCabe crackled to life over the radio, with great news. Though reinforcements certainly would not make it past the Port Muirkirk blockade, he had successfully gotten a rocket full of food and munitions launched to their location, which would land within a few hours. With an “I told you so” to the miners, Kesdis ended the conversation. None in the party felt the miners’ accusation against Kesdis was anything more than derangement.

While De Vranne began to clear the freighters with the hunters to teach them small unit tactics, the party had some down time to talk amongst itself. Gaston visited Eleanor for a therapy session about his vision quest, coming away much calmer and with better techniques on how to handle his own fear. Meanwhile, Belle had refused to see Eleanor, so fellow Irishwoman Moirin came to her with a bottle of hearty Irish whiskey to try to break through. Though suspicious at first, Belle ended up speaking to Moirin at length, revealing some personal details—including the revelation that Belle used to be in the FIRA, fighting the communist Irish government before she lost her hand. Belle began to ask Moirin what she knew of McCabe, but would not continue the conversation if Moirin did not match Belle’s aggressive drinking. Making the excuse that as the explosives expert, she shouldn’t have any more to drink until after she had checked her traps, Moirin refused. The two tabled the discussion with mutual suspicion.
In another room, Gaston and Granny Lockheart discussed the strange female scream that emanated from Lockheart’s “etheric projector”; Lockheart finally explained what it actually was: a projector for the soul of a powerful psionic and one of the founders of the Academy of Saldan, Sadine. Gaston recognized the technology as similar to the projections of the Foundation aboard a certain Mage Imperium Station from his tales... The two continued to trade stories, developing a budding friendship.

Business aboard the ship concluded for now, Kesdis led Belle, Lockheart, Abbey, and Dozir back to the airlock door in the junction leading to Gant’s office and lab. Seeing a working call panel, Kesdis announced the party; the singsong voice of Dr. Gant greeted them, overjoyed he was finally being rescued and warning the party about “the psychopaths at the other end of the tunnel.” Opening the door into the decontamination chamber, Gant explained that he could be found in the morgue; he asked the party to please gather any of his notes they found along the way, to also be saved. Forebodingly, he warned the party that beyond the door was a bit of a mess, but that nothing in his lab would hurt them.

As the decontamination chamber opened into the hospital wing, the away team was met by an abattoir. The bodies of both Gant’s security personnel and spiders alike littered the hallways; the miners had mentioned some great battle had happened in here, and they were apparently right. The only survivors, interestingly, were some pallid, starved-looking individuals in patient’s gowns, shambling around mutely and staring at their feet. Gently prying pistols and improvised weapons from their limp hands and trying to get their attention, Lockheart made a sad discovery: not only were these individuals traumatized to total insanity, but they were in fact soulless. As the room inside was charged normally, Lockheart suspected immediately that the shamblers were made this way not because of the spider god, but as a result of Gant’s medical experiments. It was a cruel, but effective strategy: if the spiders hunted people with souls, then the best killers of them would be the soulless.

The team examined the somehow still-functioning security terminal, an etheric computer. Interestingly, its power, as well as all of its security functions, had somehow been routed to the morgue. There were two uncorrupted records: the first, a final log by the security officer noting how much even Gant’s own personnel wanted to assassinate him. However, the officer journaled, they had all gotten orders from someone very high up that he should not be touched. The second was the metadata from a failed distress signal to Port Muirkirk. Apparently, the message had failed because someone had emergency expired the encryption key for the terminal’s communications systems; the administrator listed for this action was McCabe’s designator. Lockheart, realizing that McCabe had blocked the distress call from Gant’s office, asked Kesdis suspiciously if she knew anything about this; Kesdis said that she did not. The party split, Kesdis going to meet Gant while Lockheart explored the lab wing’s geophysical section. (Two other sections, archaeological and xenozoological, went unexplored.)

Kesdis found Gant in the morgue, surrounded by bodies executed by deep trephinations. Demanding an explanation for the shamblers, Gant excitedly revealed his research: he had discovered a way not only to make contained nullspace, but to turn those containers into batteries holding the entire etheric energy of a person’s soul—a battery to outmatch nearly any existing power source of its size. Gant explained his “absorption pike”: archaeological research had indicated that the holy symbol the likes of which the party had seen, the three concentric circles, created localized intensified energy absorption effects similar to what the spider god did across the whole planet. (This harkened back to the strange gravitation Lockheart had found in the camp administrator’s office.) When the symbol was forced into a small, etherically shielded container, it could turn only the contents of the container into null space after being allowed to work for a few hours. The holy symbol was then detached, and the null space container was affixed to a quicksilver bit which could be plunged into a souled creature. Nature abhorring a vacuum, the quicksilver trepan would conduct the etheric energy of the victim to quickly drain to fill the null space, tearing apart the victim’s soul in the process.

Violent and inhumane as it was, though, it created a battery with the power of a human soul, but without the problems of ensouled technology. To prove his point, Gant showed that his etheric computer in the morgue had been running on the batteries for weeks. Kesdis realized finally why the ATC wanted Gant so badly: this invention could change the field of etherics forever. It had the added benefit, Gant added, of protecting people from the spiders: as a test, Gant had let spiders in to slaughter the survivors within the facility, and they had attacked everyone except his “patients,” who in turn killed the spiders.

Lockheart, meanwhile, learned a few things in the geophysical labs. First, it was revealed that part of the reason the “gravitational field” (by now, known to be the spider god) was so effective was a result of the planet’s concentration of quicksilver. Whereas on a regular world, the absorption of etheric energy would take place slowly and weakly over the area of the entire planet, the quicksilver was acting as a superconductor: as much of the etheric energy on Kamens was already charging on or attracted to the quicksilver, it was acting as a series of waypoints from which the gravitational field could draw on all at once, instead of having to exert pull on the entire area. Lockheart understood this to mean that the spider god was using the quicksilver almost as a circulatory system; indeed, it might have been why the god was on Kamens at all.

Lockheart read a second, more macabre discovery: the gravitational effect was causing the souls of the dead not to immediately leave their bodies, but appear to stay for some amount of time. Lockheart remembered grimly that the Nocturnals had been offering the bodies of dead, unpossessed miners to the spiders for them to take deeper into their holes; Lockheart suspected that these bodies were still souled, and that based on Ketevan’s information, the spider god was doing something with them. Finally, Lockheart got a readout of planet-wide etheric fluctuations for the last few months; interestingly, there was negative correlation between population of Kamens by the ATC and its levels of etheric energy. Though having people and equipment on the surface should have been adding to it, it appeared that having more people and machinery on the planet triggered stronger gravitation, which led to a net decrease. Lockheart realized this was probably the spider turning its absorptive effect off and on based on whether there was prey on Kamens to exploit.

Lockheart finally left to confront Gant with Kesdis. Lockheart asked Gant to talk about what he knew of the holy symbol and how it worked; Gant explained that it appeared to be the inverse, based on translations of discovered texts, of a summoning ritual. Whereas summoning rituals take power from a god to put it on earth, the ritual that this symbol invoked took power from the earth to give it to the god. Though canonically the god was apparently quite capable of taking power from Kamens by itself with its absorptive effect, worshippers putting the symbol in different places created new hyperconductive nodes in the god’s “circulatory system” that could drain the areas they were placed in much more quickly. It was much clearer now why the possessed in the camp seemed to often be found with these symbols; they had probably been compelled to make them in service to the spider god. Gant indicated that it was a fairly simple matter to destroy them.
With nothing else to learn from Gant, Lockheart and Belle were visibly disgusted, and openly considered killing Gant. Their case only improved with the revelations that Gant apparently had not had to eat in some time, the same way the Nocturnals didn’t, and that technically speaking Gant had been a constant producer of the spider god’s holy symbol. Finally, Kesdis revealed that the miners had been telling the truth: she had been given the objective to safely extract Gant, and that if the others killed him, the ATC would be furious. This and Kesdis’ orders still were almost not enough to convince them, but Lockheart finally relented with the understanding that Gant’s research could probably help her own projects. However, Lockheart noted that if all the ATC wanted was Gant’s research, Gant could possibly be made disposable if Lockheart could reproduce and improve Gant’s work more morally and pitch it to McCabe; Kesdis agreed to consider this once they left.

After Kesdis told Gant to prepare to leave, Gant grabbed a scalpel and set to work executing his old patients, the facility’s soulless, insane shamblers. Abbey quickly restrained him, wanting more than ever to snap his neck; deeply offended, Gant asked the party what else it planned to do with the shamblers if it wasn’t going to take the shamblers with it. With this, the party faced a dilemma. The shamblers did not appear to be able to feed themselves; unless they were fed and actively cared for, they would starve to death (they had been starving all this time as it was.) But if the party took them back to the ship, the miners would riot over the idea of the rations being used to feed the braindead, soulless shamblers—if the hunters didn’t outright eat the shamblers first. And indeed, none present thought it was moral to follow Gant’s lead and mercy-kill them. Hardest of all, whichever solution the party chose had to be sustainable without its presence, as IF the party wanted to pursue the spider god, it had to fly the ship miles away from Gant’s office.

(Kesdis noted that this was in fact an “if”: despite some in the party’s apparent enthusiasm to kill the spider god, the fact that the party now had Gant, miners, and possibly the shamblers to get to safety, as well as a distinct lack of material readiness to kill a god, was calling into question what Kesdis felt the party’s primary objective should be. She planned to address this with McCabe when she updated him on having Gant; Lockheart agreed with this assessment.)

With the only immediately-available options to kill the shamblers, let them starve, or take them to the ship and subject them to third parties, the team hoped to create a fourth option by leaving for the moment to consult with Eleanor about how much they could actually be helped, and if at all, whether she would consider sneaking them rations and caring for them indefinitely. Hearts heavy with the morality of saving Gant while potentially damning his innocent patients, the away team returned to the ship with the mad doctor and his research in tow.

How will the miners receive him? Will the party keep Gant alive? What will the party do about the shamblers? Will it even decide to face the spider god? How did the miners know the secret information they knew? Will de Vranne blam everybody for their incompetence and treachery?