Stranded in Gennus (Leviathan)

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## Recurring NPCs

Aryutta Nefta Tsarin Zjo, Voice of Tsarin

"Stranded in Gennus" is the sixth episode of the first season of Leviathan: Distant Stars.

## Summary

The episodes starts with the crew of the Bat'leth leaving their ship now docked in Tsarin's cargo bay and getting reacquainted with the living ship of which most of them are now part of the crew.

Conrad / Kenny nurses his bruise.

Xe'anna loses a battle with her inner demon in bottle form as she takes a swig from a liquid that’s either cleaning fluid or alcohol. She does her best to keep it out of Kika's reach.

Theea and Kika discuss their future, and whether they'll all remain together or not.

Cards are played.

Hexie takes interest in Tsarin's biology.

Kika and Theea work on fixing the Bat'leth's weapons systems and making a translator to ease communication between Ary and Conrad... or maybe they spend their time fixing the paint of the Bat’leth instead, restoring its shortened name to its former glory, adding racing stripes and signing their oeuvre.

As for Xe'anna's reaction, suffice it to say that Theea and Kika have reason to feel their lives are more threatened by their captain than by the situation Ary reminds them of: the Raze are still a threat, Ary is not sure how to trace her steps back to where she was before the spirates attacked and, of most pressing concern, Tsarin's thread drive has been damaged. Instead of threading twice as fast as the Bat'leth, Tsarin is now only half as fast, which means they need to find adequate spare parts in their immediate vicinity.

Their best bet is Gennus Landing where there is good hope Hexie will find the right contact among the engineered and *spirates not spirating* who can be found there.

The *brightly painted junker* known as the Bat'leth will dock at Gennus Landing. There, Theea and Xe'anna will look for information in the “markets” while Conrad, Hexie and Kika start at the bar.
Ary and her *weird* ship meanwhile will stay some distance away.

As Hexie remarks:

> *It's a bad day when the current Bat’leth is the discreet option.*
>
>

On Gennus Landing, Theea, with some help from Xe'anna's skills at gentle persuasion and after a tense situation involving armed aliens is defused, is the first to coax a lead from a deep green alien that reminds Kika of a shark. If the ever drunk Vel Nartis the alien leads them to is not delusional, they will be able to find the advanced technology they need and thank their informer with a trinket.

Being in the right place when meep-meeped the information, Hexie directs her attention to the more awake of two patrons at the bar. Not one to leave a bartender idle, she treats her interlocutor to some of the house's best and gets that Vel Nartis is the other, barely functional, patron. With little more effort than getting a broken drink promptly fixed, Hexie gets all the information she needs, and a map to boot, about the nearby Erzati System and Usvedi, its technologically advanced planet Vel knows does exist even if, according to ship sensors, it doesn’t exist. Usvedi is where a weird ship can get its unusual thread drive fixed.

While Kika is able to help by showing proper, and genuine enthusiasm for Vel's story, Conrad is driven out of the bar as soon as he tries, in a fashion seen as creepy by several patrons, to feign striking a conversation with a *young lady* a.k.a. Kika. Adding insult to injury, Hexie insists on letting Conrad return to the ship alone rather than risk damaging their own reputations. More consoling are the later realization that being wrongly thought of as a creep is still better for Lt. Conrad Carls Jr.' well-being than being rightly recognized as a Guardian and Kika's*There is a nonzero percent of this ship who enjoys your company, that's a pretty big deal*.

Xe'anna confides in Conrad to pilot the Bat'leth through the jumps that will bring them to the mysterious Usvedi. Meanwhile, Tsarin and its crippled thread engine will go their separate, longer way there. The lieutenant's prowess and Theea's flawless assistance make the first of two difficult jumps fully but barely successful. The second jump, however, is marred by a power spike that leaves the weapons systems Kika had just started to turn her attention to before departure completely disabled and prone to failure in the longer term. Conrad draws what Xe'anna deems an incorrect conclusion from their situation: *Never thread into unknown space!*

Kika is left still dreading and trying to delay the wrath she expects to incur from the captain whenever she eventually goes to the cargo bay for exercise or whatnot and first lays eyes on whatever Kika's artistic license turned it into.

## A Quote

This quote from Theea, I put here without context for philosophers to ponder. There is certainly a deeper meaning I haven’t caught:

> *It's really important, when you... don’t break a ship when you’re fixing a ship... to be really good on the timing of that... fix being needed. Anyway.*
>
>

## Notes

1. ↑ See the end of Ep 5.
2. ↑ You wish! Repairs were flat out forgotten and the only effort toward improving communication between Ary and Conrad was Kika's renewed insistence that Conrad also bond with Tsarin. Fortunately for the Lieutenant, Xe'anna would had none of it.
3. ↑ In civilian clothes, and with a rifle whose ICA markings were cleverly concealed by the joint efforts of Theea and Kika.
4. ↑ Let's make it a verb, shall we?
5. ↑ What a failed dice roll can do to a nice young man’s reputation...
6. ↑ I see conflicting evidence in my notes on the shape of the weapons system before the jump's incident.
7. ↑ No irony here.