A corporate merchant ship that’s in the system has gotten screwed when the garbage eating aliens, vexiles, got violent and started eating people. The solution? Send in the expendable death row inmates, of course.
There were three goals to the mission:
- Secure the cargo holds for actual military people
- Kill bugs
- Optionally, find the source of the infestation and why they’re so murder-y
- Keep structural damage to a minimum
No points for guessing what they fail horribly at, but you can get a ‘captain obvious’ hat!
The party consisted of:
-Bastien (played by AbstractTraitorHero) the dangerously unqualified prick, with a gauss rifle and a microwave field manipulator.
-Citotp (played by Egan_BW), who is oddly charming and wielding dangerous space magic.
-Filgres (Toaster), an enthusiastic guy with a kinetic amp.
-Grits (Pancaek), a technician who was carrying a gauss rifle too.
-Joanna (Twinwolf), a medic with a monoatomic razor.
-Vik (spazyak), somewhat qualified in a couple things with a laser rifle and microwave manipulator.
First thing comes first: Getting on-board. The shuttle pulls up beside the ship and the party hops out of the shuttle desperately trying not to think about the chance of getting instantly murdered by micrometeorites. Bastien manages to get to the airlock and open it, and then inside safely despite thinking the ceiling was the floor and the floor was the ceiling, followed by Vik catapulting himself into a wall, Grits falls on his face as he enters the airlock, Joanna gracefully lands like a space fairy, and Citotp stumbles. Filgres follows shortly after. Bastien takes the opportunity to flirt with the single woman in the sausage fest who studiously ignores him because it’d be bad for a medic to be pissed at one of her charges.
The group enters the ship proper, and proceeds through the ship together. They head towards the target location. They start seeing signs of the infestation - footprints, pieces of torn clothing and personal effects, and teeth. Oh, and they can hear skittering feet in the walls. For no apparent reason, Citotp has the wonderful idea of burning a pile of those things. First overload of the game! Citotp is brought to his knees holding his head as he desperately hopes his brain doesn’t melt out of his ears, but he got the trash! He also got the passcard the group needed to continue! And less importantly, Filgres’ lower body! The fire alarm blares and foam falls on everyone. With Filgres officially dead weight without any outside intervention, the aliens choose this time to show up.
People open fire. Grits displays competence and shoots some foam-covered bugs. Bastien displays his total non-qualification and just shoots Vik, proving that just because you’re allies with the stupid prick does not mean you are safe from him. Vik manages to fire, swinging his laser rifle wildly and slicing a few bugs. And walls. And the reactor. He gets shocked by Dave for his trouble. Textbook ER encounter: Friendly fire and collateral damage! Surely, a good sign for the game.
Joanna uses her monoatomic razor as a makeshift scalpel on Vik as she chops away the infected flesh and dumps a bunch of medifoam on it, sealing the wound and the hole it left in the suit. Wound count - 2 horrible wounds without the enemy even reaching the party.
Filgres embraces life as a backpack as the team moves on, reaching a reinforced door for the cargo bay. Before anyone can consider caution, Vik decides to open the door. For a moment, the inmates stare at the bugs. The thirty alien garbage-disposal turned murder-machines, with multiple mutations, stare back. Dave helpfully chimes in that finding their source - and the source of mutations - is no longer optional. Vik very, very slowly closes the door. Then people move and the
vexiles attack, at which point Vik decides ‘fuck slow’ and slams the button. The group decides to vent them from the bridge. The party retreats back, towards the bridge, and is stopped by a blast door. This is when a small avalanche of bugs decides now is omnom time.
The team opens fire, and a couple of shots manage to take out many of them because gauss rifles on unarmored targets, and the bugs take a break so they can eat each other. Vik manages to melt a small wall of them, giving plenty of time. Bastien, deciding that the situation is not adequately fucked, decides firing a gauss from the hip is smart. The prick loses his finger as the gun leaps from his hand, and when it collides with the blast door it fires again, shredding his thigh. The door is opened, the party dragged through, and the door closed again as they enter the crew quarters. They can hear screaming in the distance (apart from Bastien).
Briefly considering practicing medicine with a laser rifle and thinking better of it, Vik heads towards the screaming. There’s a crew member in the middle of being eaten, which Vik remedies by shooting the five Vexiles and also making the man a quadruple amputee - which is better than singular dead at least. Joanna treats Bastien enough that he isn’t in immediate danger of death, and despairs at the idiocy around her and the lack of proper medical facilities.
The party files into an elevator, after encountering more bugs and causing more collateral damage. They drop too quick, although nobody quite dies. Joanna continues to be a space fairy, most of the others are fine, Citotp gets knocked the heck out and a bunch of leg bones.
Grits gets to work on the infestation problem. This ‘work’ involves venting the entire ship besides the bridge, killing any vexiles and any non-stasis’d survivors almost instantly. He then vents life support too, dooming the ship and further destroying any chance of the group pretending they were causing reasonable collateral damage. Now, the party only has to find the source of the vexiles, without anything actually dangerous to nom them! Except for the cold vacuum of space and the fact three of the suits have tears, albeit tears sealed with medifoam.
Grits keeps on working, looking through the video logs, finding some clues - the first deaths happened only a day out of stasis. Then he accidentally deletes 90% of the logs. Doesn’t matter much in the short term, as the party heads off to finish the mission. Bastien dies due to a hole in his suit (self-inflicted). They dump the dead and crippled into the shuttle, before heading to cargo bay 1B, and their suits yell at them that their risk of cancer has gone up drastically on account of a sudden rise in radiation.
The people who can walk find the source in the cargo bay, some unidentifiable machinery, as two cripples fight over rope. As Grits and Joanna try to consider a reasonable way to move the thing, Vik decides that the best course of action is to completely destroy the thing and cut it to bits, and while he’s congratulating himself he forgets to turn off his cutting torch, and subsequently burns a hole in his suit. It turns out that medifoam cannot withstand the heat of a torch made for cutting metal to bits.
The bits weren’t worth half as much as the thing would be intact, but now it could be brought back to the shuttle - which the two people capable of walking did, along with the corpse and the cripples, and several vexile corpses.
Casualty Tally:
Bastien and Vik: Dead
Filgres and Citotp: Cripples
Joanna and Grits: Alive
The Ship: Wrecked beyond repair
All wounds were self inflicted or friendly fire
ER’s back, folks
E: Fun fact, as I edit in the new pages for ED's mission synopsis and the mission summary itself, the wiki now has 666 pages. Can someone check over the pages I made? It's the first time I've done that))
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Topic: Einsteinian Roulette Early Days On ship Thread (Read 35846 times)