The Pirates Campaign/Session 2

Adrift for several days, all have had time to heal fully. Deep into Brass Cities territory. Others that were at the Pin Jump may be scattered through Brass Cities space. May no longer have the element of surprise.

* Old Fialta general whose yacht we commandeered (one of Tusk’s plastic surgery customers) is on board, plus a couple of his guys.

Who’s the captain?

* ACE says he is the captain. He has about a five-year-old’s proficiency in any trading languages. Prax informs him that the captain’s job is to guard the prisoners. ACE is game.
	+ The general is half-senile and concerned about his cheek flab
	+ Valet is mainly a sommelier
	+ Crew: pilot, engineer/mechanic
* The yacht is a pleasure craft – doesn’t have the resources (food) for a long expedition. Maybe a week’s worth of food.
* Cromwell doesn’t want to be in charge, just an advisor. He advocates separation of powers between pilot and captain. Suggests Horatio Prax (Aetherfish) as captain and himself as first mate. Thefaren asks if they’ll be boring and Prax shoots off some confetti from his shotgun. Thefaren approves.

Interview guests/captives/’real owners of the yacht we stole’ (the Purple Porpoise)

* Pilot and engineer onboard. Pilot can detect radio signals, but otherwise not accomplished. Flight school dropout.
* Aetherfish asks A.C.E. to watch pilot while talking to engineer. Aetherfish inspires engineer to the cause of the party. Asks engineer to detect radio chatter. Engineer finds bursts of long-range communication, but communications are very low frequency. Suggests that it may be interplanetary method of communication for Brass Cities. It is definitely encrypted; C.L.A.R.C. tries to decrypt communications. Tepid success, Brass Cities maintain subtle communication – the data comes by varying cyphers. Communications are frenzied attempts to understand what happened at Pin Jump. Have activated protocol to acquire ‘information assets’ which are ships like the yacht.

Where do we go?

* Can go towards the Pin Jump or the Margravate. Party likes idea of Margravate more. Melon Tusk resists stress damage over losing assets.
	+ Pin Jump appears to be compromised; even if our accounts are real, no access to them b/c Brass Cities won’t trust it.
* Cromwell checks to see if any Knight’s Mercantile caches are on the way to Margravate. He has no knowledge or any caches on the way, may be because Brass Cities territory is unfriendly.
* Thefaren tries to take advantage of etheric anomalies to speed up ship. (Nat 20!) Thefaren success in booking it towards the Margravate. Slingshot ship, operating ship well beyond safety parameters. Takes us to very frontier of Brass Cities space. Thefaren leaves part way through navigation to eat all of the caviar (with a fork).
* Brass Cities have detected us.
* But we got pretty far: “Except for what I’m about to inflict on you, you’re home free.”
* What did we pass? A blanket of silence has fallen across what was probably once the Margravate’s busiest space

**Pirate references are worth +1 to next roll**

Arrival at frontier of Brass Cities and Margravate space

* In the midst of rapidly closing ‘brass jaws’. Four ships are closing on location.
* About 2.5 days from the front line of the Margravate.
* CLARC tries to determine communications of ships. Trying to determine location of our ship using relative of their ships.
* Ships are etheric hunting ships. Likely very large.
* CLARC and Thefaren come up with sneaky plan to avoid ships. Party want to put prisoners in skiff to be a decoy.
* Aetherfish (Nat 20!) convinces prisoners that going on the skiff is the best way to survive and escape. Further convinces prisoners that we are the ones being put at risk.
* Skiff sent away, buys us time or at least reduces forces against us.
* Thefaren removes throttle from ship (Nat 1). Thefaren succeeds…
* What is the crew compliment on Brass Cities ships? Motherships has 1000s of robots that control frigates
* Frigates don’t really have guns (they build very sophisticated machinery, but that’d be like lances plus some mediocre cannons). Frigates will deploy drones, likely 18 to board ship. We can likely take on one frigate, but not three.
* Thefaren suggests ramming our ship into one of the frigates. Jump from our ship to the other frigate.

Boarding the frigate

* Thefaren makes checks to slingshot ship with anchor around frigate, somewhat successful but the yacht’s engines explode. (It makes them go faster.)
* ACE departs smoothly (with Melon Tusk on board) but decides to approach at ramming speed, CLARC (with Agnar) flung into space. Thefaren and Cromwell land successfully. Melon Tusk reads the room and jumps off of A.C.E. just before he makes impact, and finds an entrance to the ship.
* The Aetherfish tries to harpoon C.L.A.R.C. and Agnar but misses, so instead adjusts around the other side of the ship. C.L.A.R.C. fires a rocket launcher to propel itself and Agnar to the ship; upon landing, C.L.A.R.C. has its face shorn off by the engine.
* A.C.E. goes in a berserker rage; he cleaves lots of drones. He knocks out one of the two boarding drills. Then he gets sleepy. He takes a nap in the piles of dead drones; his power armor kind of blends in.
* Thefaren and Cromwell move towards bridge. Captain is a large automaton. Between the captain and Cromwell is thick glass plating. ‘Windows’ are really fortified view ports. Brass Cities don’t really understand etherics.
* Cromwell tries to identify weaknesses in Brass Cities robots (Nat 1). ‘Obvious key’ to deceive robots is to enter ventilation systems and present self as a lifeform that is not humanoid. ‘They cannot attack what they cannot understand’.
* Cromwell and Thefaren enter the ventilation system. Sees Cromwell work in an ‘octopus like’ fashion. Cromwell crawls to the ceiling of the cockpit.
* Captain informs crew that there is a ‘pest problem’ in the ventilation system and that the system will be purged. Thefaren jumps out of vents and avoids flame damage. Cromwell gets singed.
* Cromwell drops onto captain, which is bolted to the floor. Cromwell… is a bone? He disables the captain temporarily.
* Aetherfish makes an entrance onto the bridge. Thefaren applauds Aetherfish, robots are unfeeling.
* C.L.A.R.C. cleverly introduces itself as CLARK with a ‘k’. The robots believe it and presume it is bringing reinforcements. C.L.A.R.C. sees bomb drones heading into the engines, and follows. Perhaps they are trying to disable the ship to give the mothership time to arrive…
* CLARC attacks bomb drones, bomb drones denote and errant shot from CLARC destroy engines. The pressure differential with the outside (through the cracked cockpit from Cromwell & Thefaren’s entry)
	+ Cromwell notes, “my bones are going to hatch.”
	+ Thefaren sees ‘too many bones’. Bones try to reassemble Cromwell. Bones need flesh only to assemble themselves, then discard flesh. Skeleton heaves itself forward. Skeleton is a parasite within Cromwell and now is Cromwell. Mouth elongates and forms distortions of speech. Pantomime of intelligence, moves towards Thefaren. “We have hatched”.
	+ “Thank you Wes for delivering the Halloween special”
	+ Thefaren forms an ‘unbreakable bond of weirdness between an elf that thinks being a daredevil is a form of worship and a spiky skeleton’.
	+ Due to clarc’s enthusiastic reinforcements, the engines are totally destroyed; no raw materials to propel in a meaningful way. C.L.A.R.C. & A.C.E.’s etheric launch systems aren’t gonna cut it. We have a lot of time to contemplate the impending arrival of the mothership. It comes in about 12 hours, preparing to collect this husk of a ship… as we are dragged (by the etheric curvature of its own size) into the jaw of the mothership, we pass the skiff, with the general & his crew on display (their skin stretched out ..?!?!?), on the way to our “interrogation of a lifetime”.
		- In the intervening time, CLARC collects the drones to learn where the group is, where the mothership is coming from, what all has happened in the Brass Cities in the last 500 years, …
		- The Aetherfish christens the ship the *Listless Lamprey*
	+ Five porcelain-faced humanoid robots descend from the mothership towards us. They are one degree of separation from the mechanical god. They wear the flayed skins of countless Margravate victims.