Involuntary Redundancy

**Involuntary Redundancy** was an adventure DMed by Jack. A trio of investigators attempted to solve a murder on a space station.

## Background

There has been a murder on the NSS Luna, a small research-focused space station owned by the intergalactic megacorporation Nanotrasen. Harral Zebbor, an engineer in the station's Atmospherics department, was found dead inside his spacesuit beside an airlock, apparently asphyxiated after returning from a spacewalk. Riley Sunday, the lone detective on board the Luna, sends a request for aid against this unknown foe. The party received an offer from Nanotrasen to address this call, with a considerable amount of hush money as the reward. Some would call them specialists, others consultants or problem-solvers - above all they are discreet, the most important quality for Nanotrasen, a company with more than a few skeletons in the closet. The party travelled to the station with the following authority: they may conduct whatever searches are necessary, talk to whomever they like and utilise nonlethal and lethal force where necessary, so long as they solve the problem and keep their mouths shut afterwards.

The Luna is a small plasma research station by Nanotrasen standards, but it still has the requisite facilities to fulfil its functions: a cargo hold, a medical bay, genetics and virology laboratories, a security complex, an offside telecommunications satellite and an atmospherics and power complex, with a series of interconnecting maintenance tunnels running between them like arteries. Normally quite a busy station, the Luna also boasts a restaurant and bar called the Maltese Falcon, a botany laboratory, and personal offices for command staff. However, numbers have dwindled in recent months as staff have been reallocated to other projects, and the Luna is now run by a skeleton crew, which has amplified the detrimental effects on morale caused by the recent death of Harral Zebbor. This depopulation is Nanotrasen policy: crew are rotated between facilities regularly and a station can take some time to re-crew. Research is not being carried out at full capacity as the station waits for an injection of new crew members.

The majority of the crew are human or humanoid, and race relations are generally reasonably genial. The civilian captain retired some time ago, and while a replacement is being found, the station is under the administration of Head of Security Khloe Alice, with the assistance of Detective Sunday and the Head of Personnel Gerald Torthian. Vice-Captain Torthian should be your first port of call for any queries about the crew, and should military aid be required, Acting Captain Alice has been instructed to assist you. There are two Nanotrasen cyborgs to assist with menial and dangerous tasks, but these are Asimov-compliant and if they are not helpful to your investigation, they shall at the very least not be harmful. Two cyborgs recently perished in an industrial accident, but a replacement is being manufactured on a nearby planet.

## Synopsis

The party reconvened on the Arrivals Shuttle of the Luna after some time apart. Nolan Bruce and Selene Ankat were surprised to discover that their old colleague Duke Quasar had undergone a rather dramatic personality change after a journey to the Black Moon of Nero V, which he encouraged them to visit while denying that anything bad had happened to him during his trip. Nolan and Selene were dubious, but decided to leave it be for the moment. Once the shuttle docked, the party were met by Acting Captain Khloe Alice, Head of Personnel Gerald Torthian and station detective Riley Sunday, who briefed them on the situation and gave them ID cards with access to most of the station, as well as earpieces which could communicate on the general and security channels. The party asked if there was somewhere they could work, and Gerald directed them to the janitor's closet, where Duke investigated a bin and Nolan and Selene discussed their next steps.

Heading first to the scene of the crime, an airlock in a maintenance tunnel above Engineering, the party discovered that the airlock had been held open with an odd-looking crowbar and that the access logs showed that the victim had returned to the station before he was killed. They then decided to investigate the Engineering department, where the victim worked. They spoke first with ageing atmospheric technician Delboy Samson, who kindly but firmly refused Duke's repeated requests for "fuel" to "help with the investigation". Delboy discussed relations within the department and in particular the victim's fractious relationships with many of the crew, including current Chief Engineer Rachel McIntyre, who was the first to find the body. He also informed them about airlock safety protocol and the purpose of the various spacewalks the crew undertook, noting that the victim may have been brash and confident, but that he knew how to do his job and took safety seriously. Suspicious, the party decided to question the Chief Engineer herself next, whereupon Duke made more requests for fuel and was ignored. He attempted to override Rachel's authority by contacting Khloe over the security channel, but she refused his requests as well. Rachel admitted that she hadn't liked Harral on a personal level, but seconded Delboy's opinion that Harral knew how to do his job and was a valued member of the overworked Engineering department. She discussed how she dragged the body (still in its hardsuit) to Medbay as soon as she was able to remove the obstruction in the airlock, but that the doctors were unable to save him.

Rachel offered to examine the hardsuit if the party could bring it to her, so they traveled next to the Security department, where they noted that the body had signs of physical trauma that Riley and surgeon Sonny Ridell said were consistent with the physical trauma of being dragged while in a hardsuit. Riley and Sonny further told the party that there were traces of CO2 in the hardsuit's oxygen tank, and showed them the smaller crowbar which had been found jammed in the airlock. Duke donned the hardsuit - partially to transport it to Rachel and partially to give him something to do - and the party attempted with mixed success to ascertain whether its internal systems were working properly, a task rendered more difficult by Duke's newly-updated biology. The party then went over to the Cargo department, and attempted to get cargo technician and Acting Quartermaster Melisa Tordesillas to help them find out whether the strange crowbar had been ordered recently. Melisa was initially unhelpful and provided the party with a printed spreadsheet of every crowbar order in the last two years, but the party intimidated her into not being difficult about it and she refined the search, showing that these crowbars came in occasionally but were not especially common.

Selene and Nolan then asked Khloe if they could access the station's camera system, and she granted them access to the bridge, where a number of terminals provided some more leads. A security terminal divulged details of an investigation into a cyborg called Luxor (designation 7UX-0R) which was decommissioned after being destroyed in an airlock-related incident, though nobody was ever held responsible. Investigating the cameras didn't produce many results, as these had been switched off in the area at the time of the death, but the logs showed that cyborgs Terry and Falor had undertaken a number of spacewalks recently, with Terry's being an uncommon occurrence as he was not normally required to work outside the station. To wrap up their investigation of the terminals, Duke printed out a resumé on the medical records computer and handed it to Khloe to try and get hired on the station, ostensibly for easier access to fuel. Nolan and Selene enthusiastically supported his endeavours, with Nolan acting as a reference.

The party then returned to Engineering and briefly questioned Falor about his adherence to the Asimov rules. He explained that he would not be able to harm a human to defend himself, as that would go against the priority of the rules. They also talked to Rachel again, who was able to determine that the hardsuit had been tampered to pull from another source rather than Harral's oxygen tank. She told them that the only crew who would be likely to know how to do this would be herself, Delboy and Harral himself, along with the cyborgs. Rachel also provided a handbook on malfunctioning cyborgs, and told the party that Pericles Divine, current acting Research Director, would probably know the most about AI on the station.

I can't remember the fine details of what happened on the rest of the adventure because this was months ago and I didn't (i) put it down quickly enough or (ii) write enough notes to remind myself of the exact details. Basically, a bomb went off on the off-station testing site and it became clear that Sigrun Home had been strapped to it and blown up. There was some discussion about who would have had access to the Science sector in order to carry out this heinous act, which ended with Terry leading the party to Cargo. There, they came across the corpse of Melisa Tordesillas, and Terry locked all the doors and informed them that he was going to kill them. A fight ensued, including Falor who had been enslaved to Terry's will, and Terry was destroyed.

## Player Characters

* Duke Quasar
* Nolan Bruce
* Selene Ankat

## NPCs

* Khloe Alice
* Gerald Torthian
* Riley Sunday
* Delboy Samson
* Rachel McIntyre
* Harral Zebbor
* Vincent LaRoche
* Tinny Baldonnel
* Pericles Divine
* Sonorous Ridell
* Fortune Perchance
* Sigrun Home
* Melisa Tordesillas
* T3R-R1
* F4L-0R