20231024 - Run 44

I collapsed on the couch for a bit. Chad I think went right to trying to sell shit. He actually set up an operation out of his … “dwelling” … and over the course of 2-3 weeks managed to convert what we brought back (sans the actual ship) into 4077gp. 

One of the tapestries in the pile, however, was some kind of recipe, so Chad had Felginor take a look at it and found it it was a recipe for “casual augmentation” - “you just put that in the machine with the device and the augmentation would take care of itself”. So I have no idea what that means but Chad then decided not to sell it. Felginor beat around the bush a bit, but eventually we learn that this could be used to make a very powerful weapon…. if we had the aforementioned ‘machine’ to apply this to a weapon ‘device’.

Alright, fair enough.

“Did someone try putting this on their dick? Did someone try to augment their dick with this?” — D.va

D.va goes and asks the crew of the ship about this tapestry, and learns, after a long conversation with Ripley the marine that D.va made friends with, about the existence of “refineries” - which were, apparently, _time_ refineries. We recall Felginor had a small vial of refined time that he considered extremely precious and nigh irreplaceable, and then Ripley mentions that they’ve got some maps. “I mean they’re wildly out of date, but…”

So perhaps we will have a target. We think there are 2 time refineries in the “quadrant” of “space” that we’re in. Both around gas giants, but one is in a system particularly well known as a tourist destination and has a paradise planet that is quite beautiful, has a huge population, and so on. Teleportation gates, rejuv gear. So that sounds like a pretty good target. Until we hear about the system being famous for having a gigantic…. space elevator.

Welp I think we already found that one.

We are also working on a way to travel through the aether without the uses of gates, which we’ve started calling a ‘jammer’. Ripley and a few of the engineering staff are helping us out building this while D.va is shadowing them and learning as much about it as they can. D.va has somehow managed to find a litter of adolescent tabaxi who she has convinced that they want to be ‘interns’ in this endeavor, so there are not one but many felinoids “helping” with a vessel I’m apparently going to be travelling on.

“We have to give them Language of the Stars coding questions” — D.va

—

“What systems do you want on your Spelljammer?” — Henry

We need life support. We need propulsion. We would probably like some kind of radiant energy shielding. I’d like a med bay. We kind of need some manner of artificial gravity. Chad suggests we have some method for fire suppression. He suggests drone control for a future upgrade. Our engineering crew provides “lackluster” optical sensors which are still better than anything else we’d get on the Hub. We need a way to land on a planet and take back off.

I make a note that I need to start experimenting on basic nanites to start replaicing some of that.

But other than that, D.va and Chad coalesce around the concept of a “minimum viable product” and going out and gathering usage data instead of overengineering things.

The engineers ask if we have a protective force or deity or whatever; Karl wins out slightly over the Invisible Hand. Nyla has a candle of contact other plane that she could use to contact Karl. Karl in theory can work reasonably well with the Invisible Hand (monetization of peripheral Match-3 shrines and the ability to watch an advertisement to skip microtransaction payment).

Nyla tries to do a ritual with that candle, but something goes wrong and she goes a bit insane. I do manage to get her to pass out from alcohol, and I check in with some colleagues in the College, who seem to think that, basically, she’ll be better in the morning. (She’s better in the morning.)

Next morning, Nyla goes and gets her weird friends, and they had a denizen of the glassed planet with them, and they psyched themselves up and Nyla lit her candle again. This time she didn’t go crazy, and communed with Karl, asking him to bless the jammer - and probably also talked about matching many triplets of objects and such, but she didn’t really go into it in detail.