I go ahead and hit the button to accept; we wanted to talk to them anyway… “This is The Wager; what do you need?”

  “So… we just registered an emergency beacon, and we wanted to see if you were up for using those stealth birds of yours to investigate,” our contact, a dog-like bipedal creature with eye stalks and an utterly unpronounceable name replies as the screen comes to life, “because it wouldn't be the first time someone id a trap.”

  I blink, and check our own scanners… yeah, okay, now that I'm actively looking, there's the beacon at the edge of our effective range. I gnce at the others, and they all nod, “Yeah… we can't exactly just ignore a stranded traveler either. It makes sense to use one of our mechs. All right. We'll get one of them out to go have a look. See you in orbit around the pnar bubble.”

  Yes, pnar bubble. The Drift takes a chunk of a random pne every time someone enters or exits… and those chunks maintain most of their pnar traits for a time, which includes atmosphere, gravity, and nearly everything else. So while we're flying through a vacuum in zero gravity, as soon as we hit that bubble we'll be in… I finish my scans… full atmospheric pressure and gravity. No, there's no barrier between. No, it doesn't make sense. It's just how this pne works. So we fly the ship to the edge… this chunk had a five mile diameter… and “park” the ship just outside the bubble… about half is rock, half is air, and there's a wilting forest with a crashed ship of some kind in clear view.

  Alice speaks up, “Okay, so… we don't want to leave the ship unattended, so just one mech.”

  “I'll go,” I volunteer, “and would like a second person to pilot the mech.”

  “Sounds fun,” Charlene nods, “I'll go with you.”

  “So that leaves us babysitting comms,” Brett signs.

  “Works for me,” Alice nods, “See you soon… we still need to have that conversation with our employers.”

  “Yeah… but we should all be together for it,” I chuckle, “fighting with just a single person in each ship isn't going to end well for us if it goes that way.”

  “‘Don't split the party’, yes…” Alice shrugs, “but we also don't want to leave the ship unattended, so…” she shrugs again.

  “Yeah, slim pickings,” I agree just before I close the door, heading with Charlene down to the relevant cargo bay, where we seal off the room, unstrap one of the mechs, climb in, start it up, turn on the invisibility, open the outer cargo bay door, and jump from ship to bubble.

  We watch as the cargo bay door closes behind us, and fly down to the wreck. When we get close, we see a man in a slightly tattered kasatha microcord suit (it's one of the varieties of armor… comes in a few different fvors) with his back to us, his short hair waving in the breeze as he occasionally looks around

  “Circle for a better look?” my current copilot Charlene speaks up.

  “Sounds good,” I nod.

  We do, and… oh. Undead. Icy blue glowing eyes and an exposed jaw… “I don't recognize it, but that's definitely not still alive.”

  “Neither do I. Transmitting a picture now…” Charlene hits a few buttons on her controls.

  Brenna sends us a text, “Sorry, nothing on our end. Clearly an undead… but of itself, that doesn't mean much.”

  “Right, because so are we.” Charlene pauses, “Okay, I'll eject and go talk to him. Wings of Cover makes me really hard to kill.”

  “And the mech will likely keep me safe enough… okay, sounds like a pn,” I agree.

  I briefly nd, Charlene climbs out, I take off again to keep an eye on things from the air.

  And that's when our employers speak up on the radio, “All right… now surrender those mechanical armors of yours.”

  “Uh, no?” Alice sends on the same channel, “that wasn't the deal.”

  “We only need one to figure out how they work.” and our employer stops broadcasting.

  I watch as Alice and Brett split the ship… the why becomes obvious as the battle begins above me. Well… I can't do anything about that from here… I focus on Charlene… who's just now reaching the creature. Fortunately, she kept her comm open, so I can hear the conversation.

  “Howdy… you want off this rock?” She is speaking quite warmly.

  “You're not prey…” the beast speaks in a raspy voice, “...this is my hunting ground. You can't have it. Leave me alone with my trap.”

  That answers that. Charlene shouts, “Kill it!” into her mic as she draws her sidearm (her pets being on the ship) and I open fire with the mech, starting with a rocket and moving down to nd so I can full attack if needed.

  The beast opens fire too, using a sidearm and shooting very quickly… Charlene stops the first, casting her spell and stopping it with a wing of pure force, but the second shot puts an end to her, bsting her head off in a shower of gore.

  Seeing that, I change tactics, and put space between myself and the creature, flying up where it hopefully can't follow… I pn to strafe it to death with the long range of the ser rifle in the mech, because sidearms aren't very accurate from a distance. I shoot again as I go. The beast fires back, of course… but a mech is tough, and the range helps me. The battle goes on like that for a while… this beast is durable, but… yes, I eventually win. The mech is in bad shape, though.

  Still, I'm alive… ish…

  I hit the invisibility again as there's two very bright fshes above me. I look up, and see very hot chunks of glowing metal zooming away at high speeds… and just our supposed employer's ship.

  My radio cackles to life, “So… like I said… we only need one. Now… if you power down that wonderful invisibility cloak that keeps your tech hidden, we will safely transport you to a habitable world, and drop you off there.”

  I make sure the transmitter is off, and fly around to a spot where my mech won't immediately be visible from the sky.

  I don't turn off the volume, though, and my evil ex employer keeps talking, “I know what you're thinking…” no, you really don't, “you're thinking maybe you can get that wreck on the ground flying, and don't want to risk trusting me….”

  I hear a boom, which I presume is ship's weapons reducing the wrecked craft to less than scrap. Yeah, not my pn. We picked up “Auger” lower limbs for the mechs. That lets us go underground. Good luck finding me there… all I need is enough breathing room to rest up for a while, and I have my ship and crew mates back.

  “Now then… that's no longer an option. Surrender, little mouse…” the radio cackles, “...you're only other option is to sit here and starve.” Oh, he doesn't know I'm undead, huh? Well, I see no reason to disabuse him of the notion that he can simply wait me out.

  I get the mech good and buried about a third of the way through the solid portion of the pnar bubble, and sit and listen to the taunting, simply waiting for the idiot to give up while I keep the invisibility running. I'm pretty sure we didn't mention the Auger… but if he tries bsting to find me, he's going to destroy his prize anyway. All I need to do is wait.

  Eventually, he stops broadcasting, but I keep my finger on the button to maintain the invisibility… the reactor can keep it up basically forever: It's a Mark IV Eternal power core: The capacitors are still filling up despite the drain of the cloak. I have no reason whatsoever to talk to him. Just to avoid boredom, I rig a boot to hold the button for me, and start pying games on my armor’s built-in comm unit, using the Technomancy Sphere to occasionally top off the battery. I don't need food, air, water, drink, or charges for my entertainment: I can stay here a very long time.

  I settle in, and the world fades.

  I find I'm in space… kind of. It's outer space, but there's that rainbow py that I always see when transitioning between the material pne and The Drift… same feeling in my stomach, too… but here it's not ending. Looking around… okay, it's the bridge of a ship… or at least it was: I can see the stars directly through very rge holes in the hull... to the point where it's more holes than hull... a lot of the consoles are burned and melted, and there are corpses at a few of them… this had to have been quite the ship before… I gnce down... oh, my feet. I haven't seen those in a while… I look around… oh, Charlene, Alice, Brett, and Ferdinand are all over by the captain's chair…

  …and we're all like we were at the recruiting table.

  “Where… what…?” Okay, I'm not very coherent.

  “Welcome to the waiting room,” the Game Master answers my question, “sorry for the mess, but cleaning up doesn't keep for long.”

  “What happened?” I'm looking around, a bit confused.

  “This is how things were when I completed the ritual, partway through a jump between The Drift and the material realm… which was part of it, I had to free myself of the flesh where there was a gap in reality.” He traces my eyes to one of the corpses, “They were already dead when I made the jump. They did not perish at my hand… although they DID die under my command, working towards my revenge, so I can't say my hands are clean of their blood.”

  “You were flying a ship THIS broken?” I gnce at Brett.

  “We already went over this like an hour ago…” Brett rolls his eyes, “Yes, this was the shape the ship was in. Yes, he was managing to fly the corpse of a ship… in the middle of a battle, actually; you can kind of see the attacker over there…” he points and I look… okay, yeah, there's a dot there that's definitely not a star. “But come on… level up so you can go back and we can all get out of this wretched pce.”

  I consider that, “So all three of you died, then?”

  “Yes. They kept firing after we told them no,” oh, hey: Brett's actually talking, “but we've been here for hours, nothing works except the data pads we used to level up… and that's all those will do… and I really want to get back to… well, a world that isn't this one… so get over here and hit the books!”

  I blink, walk over, and Ferdinand hands me a data pad… it boots up with the Macrohard Doors logo when I touch it, and yes… my character sheet.

  Charlene tells me where we're at, “Now, we already took care of our own sheets, upgraded the main ship, upgraded both sub-ships, and settled on simply having a tier-1 mech for each of us rather than upgrading them all to tier-3… and nabbed the ‘Combine’! section to get a fifth that carries us all using the Seahellion frame…so we can go underwater, too.”

  “I guess I can use a summon for a second pilot,” I shrug, “let's see… hmm, there's a few Talents I haven't been using much…”

  “Oh, you can change anything you like,” Ferdinand interrupts, “You wanted to reroll without losing levels, it was only partly about death. Well… when you're here, you can do that.”

  “Oh. Cool. Let's see…” I won't be using a pet with the summons, so I can drop Creature Companion Adept… I can grab a Biped Mech now, if just a first-level one, so I no longer need armor for my Conjuration Companions; environmental field colrs will do… which means they don't need armor proficiency… huh, may as well make them Mindless… pick up Share Skills with my Arsenal Trick and they can do a few things despite not thinking… spend a feat on Extra Arsenal Trick so I can block and extend my minion’s health so I only need one… trade Extra Companion for Quick Companion… oh, Mythic… a Ring of the Iron Grip because I want a Legendary item and it needs to be magic… Mythic Traditions… I'll take a two point penalty on Charisma checks with aligned outsiders from Cursed and Unaligned to get Shadowstuff from the Fey Adept via Expertise. Spheremaster for Heirloom… Mythic feat set to Mythic Paragon so the Heirloom gets three items: Metamagician, Undetectable, and Returning, I think. A ring, so set the surge to saving throws. I keep my basic build the same, but do a lot of tweaks, in addition to the normal leveling up.

  As soon as I finish, the world starts making sense again, and I'm back in the mech… and my belly starts swelling. Right, there was a reason for the ‘all women’ thing… and I have three to bring… meaning four of us will be squeezing into a mech designed for two. Umm… joy….

  Fortunately, I'm saved from that portion by the equipment manifestation: The two person mech becomes a six person mech as my belly swells and swells. I lose the invisibility, but we're underground, so that's not too bad… I grow about a month pregnant every seven or eight minutes… well, at least I'm not using armor now… at about nine months pregnant and an hour in, my water breaks and I spend an hour in some very accelerated bor, going through more pain than I've ever felt in my life, pushing a little baby out of anatomy I am really not supposed to have… and then I am SO gd it's over.

  …and then I start swelling again as my ‘first child’ rapidly grows.

  She looks maybe a year old fifteen minutes after birth (when I look about two months pregnant)… and speaks, “That was… different.” Her voice is really high pitched.

  I blink at the naked little one year old, “how much do you remember… and who are you?”

  “All of it,” she shakes her head, “a while hanging out inside you, plenty of room to move at first but barely able to do anything, then packed up tight, squeezing out…” she considers, “oh, and I'm Alice… Mom.”

  “Do NOT call me that!”

  “Ah, but Mom…”

  “Do you want a spanking?”

  “Ooh, is that a promise?”

  After that, I just ignore her… partly because the rapid growth isn't comfortable, partly because I don't think I can win that one.

  Alice continues to grow at a rate of about a year every fifteen minutes while I balloon up with the next in line… she looks about four when I start pushing, talks me through it, and looks eight when I'm done an hour ter… and that little baby girl starts growing as well.

  All told, I'm alternating ballooning up and pushing a baby out for about six hours… Alice stabilizes at an apparent age in her mid-twenties about six hours after she comes out, with Brenna and Charlene following the same pattern, growing for six hours after birth, clearly being conscious the whole time, and stopping in their mid-twenties.

  So… it's a twelve hour process,but only because it happened three times; eight hours when it's just one... let's not do that again, please....