20240312 - Run 49

So we’re landing. There should be a colony on this planet. 

To rewind a bit: Before re-entry, we enter low orbit of the second planet and try to match constellations we retrieved from the University to constellations around this planet. It takes a bit, but we manage to pin down that these are constellations in the southern hemisphere. Based on plant description, we are guessing a temperate to subtropical latitude along the eastern edge of a continent (or large landmass, we’re not picky). Planet is a bit too cold for true ‘monsoons’ at that latitude, but they don’t quite have four seasons. This does sort of narrow down our search area, so that’s nice. Caleb and I spend a good amount of time using the telescope on the jammer and we end up finding a broad stretch of terrain that matches up with what we’re looking for - mixed grasslands, light forest, in the right place on a landmass, at the right latitude. 

At that point, we only spend a week looking for this place. Caleb manages to find the settlement on Orbit 103 in the middle of some savannah in the appropriate general location, by noticing the characteristic look of agricultural fields. Success! Looks like they don’t have much in the way of tech, but it’s definitely agriculture. So Caleb runs back to the helm and we all get to our places and land.

As we’re coming in and we  can see better, we can see that this is a distinctly low-tech planet. There are certainly some ruins elsewhere on the planet, but not easily reachable by this colony. But we do see the teleportation circle in the middle of the settlement and make our way towards it. Chad dons his best vestments, pops the collar on them, and gets ready to Negotiate. D.va brushes her fur. Nyla puts on pants. Caleb brings us in for a gentle, good, clean landing before he gets up and tries to give himself a toga or something. 

As we debark, we meet a rather nervous welcoming committee with a lot of crossbows. D.va says ‘we’re here to fix the teleportation circle’ and they relax; a young woman steps forward as a leader/representative. She’s missing her left thumb, probably from a farming accident. She introduces herself as Tai and asks us to unload any supplies or gear or whatnot we have for them; she definitely seems happy to see us, but says she’s ‘been in charge since everything went to shit’. She asks us if we can fold the wings in on the ship; when we say ‘no’, she starts ordering people to try to camoflage the ship from aerial spotters. We ask who she’s hiding from. “Other people in ships. Like this. Not like this. Yours is small.”

I stay with the ship to help camoflage it; Tai takes the rest of the group to a small room in the back of a grange barn, a tack room they’ve been using for meetings. She sits down. “First, thank you for coming. Thank you so much for bringing the equipment and supplies. I don’t even know what we’re supposed to do with the extra food; we’ve been trying to process it so it doesn’t go bad. …. We were raided. They were less showy in their approach than you were, they landed suddenly, and they took people and they took food. They look like elves.” (When I heard this later, the first thing I said was ‘Ah. Lifestealers.’) “You have to understand…. I don’t know when they might come back. If they do come back when you’re here, they’ll either take your ship or they’ll break it. They fired a pulse of some kind of magic, and … It set fire to the center of town, and it has entirely disrupted our portal.”

D.va cuts in. “Cool. The portal part is what we’re going to attempt to fix. A wizard gave me a book.” Tai says there are a few people who dabble, but in general, the people here … grow things. “There aren’t even any eye wasps here. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a place to grow things where there aren’t bugs that are going to burst out of you?” Caleb asks about ass worms. D.va derails the parasite conversation and asks for anyone skilled in any sort of arcana to assist the teleporter repair. Chad observes they’re going to need heavier firepower and throws me under the bus.

“They’ve been here twice. The first time was a relatively small raid, they disrupted the portal, abducted several people, carried off a large quantity of our grain. That was one ship. They came back with two ships. In the two ship raid, one of them stayed airborne while the other one, the larger one, landed. It seemed like it was constructed for raiding. It had these big bays that opened on the lower sides and turned into ramps. The people who were facing them…. I don’t have a better way of putting this. When I saw them and they locked eyes with me, I couldn’t move. And it wasn’t until someone else hit the person who had locked eyes with me that I was able to move again.” They were frightened, and also paralyzed. 

D.va comes back to the ship, casts alarm at the door, and I go back to the meeting with her. The raider ships did have some kind of blasting weapon, some kind of blasting rod, throwing fireballs and lightning bolts or at least doing that level of damage when fired. 

The raiders aren’t actually that many people. 8 in the first ship, 16 the second time. We could possibly just attack them. I bring up the idea of creating individual-keyed potions of fire breath for the militia; The raiders took people the second trip that implied they had gotten information from the first abductees; a smith, other influential and useful people. 

D.va tries to reconstruct how the raiders are powering their ships just from what we’re hearing, and goes out and questions some more people. Based on their descriptions of what sounds like cones of plasma venting from the sides and aft of the ship, and from what she can learn about the sounds of the ship and how it looks, the propulsion system seems impossible. That means they’ve got to be using some kind of archaeotech. Could be beamed power, could be self-sustaining power nodes that need careful and precise alignment. Probably not, though, so that leaves even weirder options - mined and refined time, power plants using the decay of highly magical elements to produce heat, bottled suns… basically, we don’t know.

Caleb and I retire to the med bay, and I start researching a gene-linked version of a potion of fire breath, both for our personal use and to equip the militia here.

R. Milhaus warns us against underestimating the raiders. He points out that they abducted people in the settlement critical for its function, thus making it easier to raid the settlement in the future. D.va and Nyla start to investigate the teleportation circle. It looks like the wave of magic simply … reset the gate. It’s no longer connected to the network of the rest of the gates connected to the Hub. But D.va gets to an impasse - from her reading of Felginor’s texts, and ‘time’ comes up quite a lot. She comes to the insight that this is refined time, not just sitting around and waiting. In the event that this other tech that these ships run on uses refined time, we may be able to use some of that to fix the gate. After a few days of that, D.va suggests we go hunting.