20230912 - Run 43
D.va begins flirting with Ripley while trying to figure out how to reach across space and time to make contact with Nyla 800 years in the future through the powers of Karl. I can tell the crew is holding it together mostly because the alternative is worse, but with the God of Doors apparently dead, they’re in permanent crisis-creates-cameraderie mode.
D.va and Ripley are talking one night. You _could_ hop through time - we’re kind of stuck in-between at the moment anyway - but a delta of 800 years would “make things weird”.
—
Nyla is talking to Frank, asking if he can send a message back in time. “With this rig? Not with this rig. We need a better rig.” And he starts pawing through a pile of sketchy cryptarcanic ‘zines covering time travel and even worse horseshit. Very little porn. Pages through multiple strata of conspiracy zine and then stabs a finger down on a piece of paper, saying “There!”
It’s a detailed - but wrong - account of our mission to retrieve Felginor. (Apparently the leader is the cleric “Chat”, and there’s a minstrel named ‘Mylar’. I blame Dickfingers for this. I don’t know how, but that Republican motherfucker caused this, I know it.) Frank starts talking about how they could use the orrery to do something or other, and Nyla has to tell him that the orrery has been blown up.
Then Frank pulls another zine-style chronicle of our exploits out of his pile, this time of the power station. “We could modulate the beam on top to send some kind of signal and and and” And at this point Nyla realizes he’s fanboying and somehow has logs of our missions, and fucks off to go find Felginor or something.
—
Felginor is not actually that much better. He definitely wants to help! A lot. With very high-powered arcane engines. In probably destructive manners. Somehow, Nyla is actually disapproving of this. (Across time and space, I am somehow touched, in a gropey tentacley sort of way.)
Then Chad snipes the conversation and invents the concept of extortionate docking fees. “We’re going to need a place to land this ship. And, so, how much does one normally charge for docking fees.” Felginor does not get nerd sniped into docking fee economics, and is still thinking about how to get the ship into ‘the Prime Material Plane’ without additional ill effect.
Felginor gets an idea on how to contact the spaceship side of the party, and preps for a trip to the power station we repaired (I don’t care, I’m not calling it the hot cold go fast place); Nyla asks subtle questions about whether or not Milhaus Flappydongs is going to be able to make the trip, which gets answered in the vaguely affirmative. (Or maybe she was asking about the continued safety of the phase spider young, which would make more sense.) Chad then asks if Felginor needs any ‘materials’ and then goes off and starts to make some calls so he can execute the ‘corrupt multilevel procurement scheme’ sacrament of his church.
Nyla has concerns about the way things are going. Chad hands Caleb some safety equipment, including a set of huge goggles built for an insectoid head. Caleb feels safer now. None of this helped Nyla.
—
[Detail ship pharma suite]
I start to dose up the crew with various pharmaceuticals, over the next few days, to get them a bit more performance, and D.va and the crew start to search for a signal.
And finally, we get a signal - an image of a blue stuffy mouse with one ear half chewed off. Which D.va recognizes as her stuffy.
“That’s it. That’s the signal.”
And the crew transforms. Before, they were barely keeping it together. Now, though, they have a purpose. People move to their stations and start preparing to come out of in-between.
We start to plan to crash land. We figure we’re probably going to end up on the power station planet, because that’s the worst possibility, so we plan for crashing into a blizzard. But aside from ‘pack up everything you care about’, there’s not too much we can do other than play it by ear.
—
Frank keeps saying “the signal is getting stronger”.
Frank and Felginor have been making friends. Nyla, Caleb, Chad, Kartho, and presumably R. Milhaus have been watching with some trepidation, because that’s horrifying.
The blizzard continues. The beam coming out the top of the power station disappears halfway up now, and something is clearly occurring, but it’s not clear quite what yet.
At some point in the frantic conversation between Frank and Felginor they both turn to the party and start yelling “They’re coming! Get ready!”. Chad has attempted to reconstruct a duracrete orbiter landing pad with light spells and rocks on snow-covered dirt.
—
D.va and I are strapped into crash couches. D.va is hitting her gauth catnip bag pretty much constantly, and is offering nicotine and/or cannabis to anyone who wants it.
The crew has been trying to rig an exo-atmospheric vessel for … endo-atmospheric lithobraking-assisted landing. So there’s definitely a lot of preparation and worry. But at least there’s a plan and a way to survive. Every department has a plan, and everything ticks down to go-time. Literally.
The captain makes a short address, and then there is a countdown.
—
Chad is standing on his jank-ass landing pad waving sticks to “land the craft”, because somehow the Invisible Hand is good at “going through the motions”.
The blizzard is raging, the lightning is crackling, and then all of a sudden… there is something else moving in the blizzard. Suddenly, all of the snow is blown differently. There is a whistling, rushing sound, that keeps getting louder and louder, and Chad can barely make out … dull orange light coming through the clouds. And then there’s a shockwave. Chad keeps his feet, but everyone - Felginor, Frank, Nyla - get knocked down.
Chad sees this wave of snow and debris racing towards him, followed by a colossal ship, and the ship stops… right in front of him. The avalanche of snow and rock sweeps over his lower body and buries him to the waist, and a hill-sized metal vessel is just … right there. Some of the energy from the tower is now arcing into the ship, and the heat of the hull melts the snow in hissing gouts of steam.
Felginor, of course, is fucking ecstatic.
—
The ship is full of alarms. The bridge is reporting piles of hull damage. Damage reports roll in, but the ship does not appear to blow up. And then the fusion plants report in.
Fusion One shutting down. Board is green.
Fusion Two shutting down. Board is green.
Fusion Three shutting down. Board is green.
And then the bridge of the Happy Voyage bursts into cheers and applause.
There’s a bunch of things to solve - the ship is full of pre-Collapse civilians with no place to live - but the ship is landed. Lots of injuries, broken bones, but no fatalities. I go to help the wounded.