20230228 - Run 38

So this guy just shot me so I punched him and took his “gun” away.

D.va and I start talking a bit, but then D.va notices that there’s a Lieutenant Commander - the one whose quarters we were in - and he’s talking to someone with one more rank bead - I guess we’ll call them a Commander. The Commander tells the LTC to deal with us, and then starts talking with the … navigator, i guess, and says something that implies they’re about to initiate some kind of jump or something, so we tell them that this ship ends up in a rock. in 800 years, maybe 1000. 

I’m trying to explain this and then we see on the display this purple cloud that the ship is about to enter…. break. in a black starburst of blacklight vectors on the screen. The LTC goes utterly ashen, the Commander lurches backwards and says “Oh fuck’. She starts snapping out orders. The little dot that is the ship starts getting closer to the black lines, and then the screen goes to fuzz. I figure at this point it’s clear enough that shit just got real that the bridge Marine I punched out might realize that I’m not the bad guy now, so I help him up. The people in the crash couches that we thought were praying or something start convulsing and screaming. 

It feels a little bit like something’s bubbling behind our eyes, and it seems like there’s static in my field of vision like what’s in the holo plot, and then… it cuts out. There’s a bunch of calm around Chad, but then everyone else on the bridge appears to be going insane - collapsing, convulsing, trying to scratch the back of their eyeballs with their fingers, the works. I ask the marine if he knows what’s going on with the black thing on the screen, he has no idea. I ask him “Fine. Any time now people are going to start turning into tentacle monsters with talons and rampaging through the ship - what would you do right now?” He starts scrambling towards a console which apparently shuts all the bulkheads on the ship, we learn. The commander is busy vomiting up liters of blood, so they’re probably about to die, great. The marine needs two keys to lock down the ship, he only has one, we get another off the commander and the marine does manage to get the ship locked down. 

Chad moves over to the ‘maintenance priests’ - the people hooked up to machines in crash couches that are constantly praying - to try to help fix shit. 2 of the 3 of them are dead, the third seems alive, but she’s whispering, drooling, and her visor is black. And Caleb says that she used to be praying in Fala, but now she’s not praying in the same language. Nyla moves over to them and can tell that they’re not quite speaking Unctan, but she does recognize some similarities - clearly in the same language family. The forms she’s familiar with being used to discuss the poetic recitations of certainty of knowledge and how one can know the existence of things - that’s a bit what this sounds like. The things being said sound like an invocation. I hear this and immediately think ‘is this a summoning’. We just heard voices like these; they were in our heads.

We ask the marine “Hey, can we disperse knockout gas across the ship?” Marine says “that’s way above my pay grade” so we both pivot and ask the LTC, who kind of freezes. Chad asks him “fine, can you lower the partial pressure of oxygen in the vessel”, so he runs over to the “life support” consoles. We send D.va over, because he seems like he maybe isn’t that great with computers and a retrocomputing hobbyist from 1000 years in the future might be better at doing this than someone for whom it is literally their fucking job. We’re not that far off the mark.

Well, except that these people are literally full of this technology, which we are not. So they’ve got implants that let them do stuff, and we don’t. Regardless, D.va’s on ‘learning’ duty.

Chad waves me over to the cleric - the nametag on her uniform reads Sillet -  crash couches. The one remaining cleric - the one whose visor is black and she’s whispering - I take one look and see that she’s not OK. Her eyes are clearly leeding or have detonated or something - the black is blood. I take the visor off, her eyes are gone. I heal her with physician’s touch, and she stops whispering in not-Unctan and starts talking in Fala. Caleb tags in; she asks where Kala and Jerry are; Caleb talks to her enough to figure out that those are her two dead comrades. Then she asks why her face is wet and why she tastes blood; he works through that as well. D.va at this point has gotten bored with watching rituals and is trying to loot bodies.

We seem to have reached some form of stability here, somehow. Fusion 2 hasn’t detonated yet. So we ask the marine to keep in contact. We have a somewhat less frantic conversation with the LTC, who turns out to be named Glarsek Huller. The ship is called the Happy Voyage 

Apparently the actual bridge suffered a critical malfunction a few hours ago, when a cloud - the purple cloud, presumably - appeared on their scopes. LTC Huller asked how we knew to come to aux bridge; we explained we just kind of happened across it after going through his quarters. He tells us that the people in the picture in his quarters are his adopted family, and he’s never married, and the stuffed cockatrice in the picture in his quarters is named Tricky. I figure that’s plenty to be able to establish trust 

Curly the marine looks over and says “I gamble for extra servings from the still, and uh” and then he gets confused because he’s still on comms with Fusion 2, and then he says “Hey, fuck you man, I’m uh” and then I look at him and say “LOOK ARE YOU INTO ANALINGUS OR NOT” and then there is a bright flash of non-existence and … then suddenly the only people in the room are me and Chad. The LTC is at the plot table, the no-longer-dead Commander is at the plot table, … we seem to be at the beginning of the loop again, I guess.

Caleb, Nyla, and D.va, however, teleport back to where we just entered the room. 

We think those three are now stuck in the time loop.

We try to convince the commander to work with us. We get the LTC and Curly the Marine on our side with our knowledge from last time through the loop, but the commander is incredibly recalcitrant. Chad gets next to the clerics in their crash couches, and we try to get everyone else within protection radius of Chad, and prep the lockdown console before we “hit” the Cloud and the black lines show up on the holo. The commander finally gets talked around, and we do manage to get everyone in range of Chad in time. This time we manage to save all three clerics as well as the commander - in fact, we save everyone but the plot officer and one of the techs. A second tech is affected, but I’m able to save them, so this loop through we manage to retain three of the four station techs.