We get back to the ship without any problems (walking through the bsted terrain isn't a big deal, it's only half a mile) and Charlene saves us the trouble of using the clickers by lowering the cargo bay doors.
She greets us with “Have fun?”
Alice nods, “it went fine. I'll fill you in…” she grins, grabbing Charlene's rear firmly, then looks back at Brenna and myself, “Care to join us?”
Brenna smiles and nods, but I shake my head, “Still not ready. And we need to get going… I can handle the ship just fine, though: It only takes one person to operate. You go have your fun.”
They have various reactions… I mean, I have done the horizontal mambo with all three of them, individually… but they leave me to it. I check that the mechs are properly secured, and head to the bridge. Picking one of the moon bases at random, I plot the course, take the controls, make sure the ship is sealed, and take off. The moon isn't currently in a great pce… it takes us an hour to reach orbit, eight more to reach the selected moon (they have two), and two more to reach the base I picked (we needed to do a bit of orbiting). I'm sitting in the pilot's seat for eleven hours, all told… the view is amazing… before we safely nd at the base.
At which point, I check the clock… huh. Still nobody? Curious. Well, we do have the ship's computer, so, “Computer, please let me know where everyone is.” Full AIs occasionally spawn from shipboard artificial personalities, so I may as well be polite.
“Alice, Brett, and Charlene are in the mess hall,” comes the reply.
Okay. Well… time to go, so, “Thank you,” I nod as I head that way.
I walk down the wide hallway with plush carpeting, keeping an active possession running on my summon so I can feel it all… Heroic Fortune is sweet as an at-will.
I open the door to the mess hall, and freeze: Because I am the only one dressed. Charlene has her face buried in Alice's aperture, Alice is absolutely focused on Brenna's behind, while Brenna in turn has her entire hand buried in Charlene's cavern, pumping it in and out. The room smells like… well, like three women have been going at it all day, heavy with the scent of salty liquids. They keep at it, apparently not even noticing me, chests, rears, hair, and limbs in a tangled mess of bare skin.
The door closes automatically a few seconds after I don't step through. I pause to collect my thoughts. Public room, I didn't do anything wrong opening the door. They're not doing anything wrong either - it's not like we actually need the mess hall for eating. And I've seen all three of them, individually, in nothing but their skin before, entirely consensually. And vice versa. I can think of no good reason why I should feel embarrassed, nor why I shouldn't just walk in and say hello.
And yet, I do feel embarrassed, and I don't just walk in.
Thinking about it a bit more, I head back to the bridge, sit down, and use the ship wide intercom, “We're here. It's time to go loot the moon base that's been sitting untouched for hundreds of years. I'll meet you all in the cargo bay.”
That done, I head there, and py some games on my personal comm unit for a good fifteen minutes, renewing the active possession (and repcing the spent spell point) every three minutes… maybe I should pick up a Conjuration Companion with the Familiar archetype so it has fewer hit dice, or the Lengthened Possession wraith haunt… eh, at level up.
When the others do arrive, I stand up and greet them warmly, “Ah, good. How would you all like to py this?”
Alice looks freshly showered; her hair is still wet in her mech suit, “We’re after the materials, so how about we use the mechs to simply disassemble the pce?”
“We'll need to get in and make sure the power is properly off first,” Charlene considers, her hair soaked as well, “I'd rather not get fsh-welded to the pce accidentally.”
“Not to mention the possibility of dangerous substances,” Brenna speaks into our minds, apparently clean and fresh as a daisy, “corrosive acids, combustible fuels, radioactive fissionables, that sort of thing. I do not want to find out what happens when I open a tank full of such things with a psma cutter.”
I nod, “So… we go in, get a map of everything, inspect everything, shut down any active power supplies, map out anything that would cause trouble, and then take the pce apart?”
Everyone nods, and I smile, “All right then….”
We pack up our tools (and weapons: There may be automated defenses), and leave the ship. There's a serious spring in my step as soon as I leave the confines of the ship: The moon has very little gravity.
I take a moment to look at the pce: It is a series of domes, connected by circur tunnels maybe a dozen feet in diameter (making them about six feet tall), studded with a number of circur air locks. Everything is bright, shiny, and seemingly pristine… this pce could have been built yesterday, from the outward appearance. I suppose that's a benefit of a ck of atmosphere.
We hop on over a few dozen feet to the facility (one single ‘step’) and get to work. Alice examines the airlock, and after a few minutes signs, “it's dead,” and does some poking to get to the manual controls, boriously turning a wheel to force the airlock open.
We walk in, and she checks the inner door as well, signing, “Also dead, no air in this area, no point in closing the outer lock.”
“Sure there is,” Brenna signs back, “keeps us from getting blown out if there's an area with air ter.”
Charlene smiles and takes care of closing the outer door as Alice opens the inner, and we march in deeper. We find a map of the facility very quickly: At the first intersection, beled “emergency escape pn” in the local nguage, with red arrows pointing the direction we just came, and blue arrow pointing to the next nearest airlock. It also has bels on the rooms, which is nice.
We systematically work our way through the facility, finding the reactor (out of fuel), an engineering bay (fully powered down), a chemical b (with spills on the ground… easy to avoid), barracks (a bunch of bunks, basically), undry (the clothes are VERY dry), kitchen (the food seems like a bad idea), and so on… all basically empty. We map the pce out, mark out everything that needs careful handling, and head back to the ship… where Brenna and I climb into the mechs to handle the heavy lifting while Alice and Charlene use psma torches to cut the facility up into stackable pieces.
After a few hours of work, our empty cargo bays are full, so we leave the mechs on the moon with Alice, Brenna, and Charlene, while I fly down to deliver the first load of cargo. I radio the city, they direct me where they want me to nd, and when their trucks roll up I open the cargo bay doors… and watch the screens as thirty commandos with armor and guns swarm out of the trucks and into the ship.
Hmm. I have a few minutes until they find the bridge… eh, why not?
I run the lift off sequence with the cargo bay doors open, depressurizing the ship as we go: I don't need the air. The ship can manage for a while on autopilot, so I block the door, set myself up behind some consoles, and give my mindless summon instructions for crouching behind the barrier and shooting anything that shows up through the door. Meanwhile, I set my flexible talents to the Life sphere, so I can keep healing the summon.
No, I don't expect to win the fight, but I have no need to do so: These commandos don't look like they're rated for vacuum, and soon enough there will be exactly zero air on the ship: All I have to do is survive long enough for them to die. Considering, I give the ship a few commands to lock everyone out of the controls for two hours. Even if I don't make it… they won't either.
The commandos kick in the door eventually, and I watch as my minion starts shooting. I keep her guns charged via the third party Technomancy sphere and regurly heal her as she fires shot after shot… but we are SEVERELY outnumbered, and she takes a lot of hits. Soon enough, I'm overwhelmed, my small mech suit wrecked, and my summon forcibly banished by damage. My ring form falls down into the wreckage.
Internally I smile.
I listen to the panic as the air gets thin. I watch as they frantically try to revive the locked down computer: It's clear they weren't trained for this, and don't even know the nguage. I listen until the air becomes too thin to transmit sound… then take on my humanoid form, and survey the result… and I'm gd I don't eat, as I would probably lose my lunch. Seriously. Humans don't explode in a vacuum - that's pure Hollywood - but these bugs do, and violently. There's chunks of caraprice and bug guts everywhere… and I can feel them crunch under my feet, as the vacuum apparently caused all the moisture in their tissues to boil away. I walk through the ship during the trip to orbit… the computer won't respond anyway… and take stock of the damage. Most of the doors are busted open, there are ugly stains everywhere… but most of the damage is cosmetic.
Thinking, I check something, “Ferdinand?” There's no air, so I can't hear myself speak - which is weird - but I can go through the motions.
“What can I do for you?” Our suited game master appears, and I can hear him just fine.
“Okay, first off,” I try to say, “how is it that you can hear me, and I can hear you, but I can't even hear myself?”
“Because I am, for most purposes, completely nonexistent,” he expins, “We were never hearing each other with our ears, as I can't interact with the air. Instead, I ‘hear’ what you know yourself to be saying, and you… well, an outside observer would think you're hallucinating.”
I nod, “I guess that makes sense. So…” I pause, “...the ship will reform after a long rest if none of us are nearby, correct?”
“Yes,” he confirms, “that's true of all your gear.”
I nod, “good… will it come back in pristine shape?”
That gives him pause, “...yes, yes it will. I'm guessing you don't want to clean up the mess?”
“I do not,” I confirm, “this much in the way of bug guts would take forever to get out of the carpeting, and knowing that they used to be people…” I shake my head, “...I want to avoid it.”
Ferdinand chuckles, looking around, “I hear that… that should be fine. It will probably get you your mech suit back, too, assuming you don't trade it out on level up.”
I raise my eyebrows, and he continues, “Yes… they were mostly just rank and file scrubs with a few squad commanders in the mix… but there were thirty of them, and now they're all dead by your hand. We harvested their lives, and it's enough for the next step up when we include prior harvests.”
“It was self-defense,” I immediately object.
“Yes, absolutely,” the ghost agrees, “You were dealing in good faith, the council wasn't. They got greedy, didn't want to pay up, or maybe just wanted what you have, and tried to take what they wanted by force. Either way… yes, it was absolutely self-defense. No question there.” Odd, he looks like he's stopping himself from saying something.
“What didn't you say?” I frown.
The man in the suit shakes his head, “If you had really wanted them to live, you could have, instead, simply abandoned ship. Get away, radio your friends handling the teardown, and taken an eight hour rest. The ship would have vanished beneath them. Or let them actually kill you. You'd be reborn through one of your allies, and the ship would again vanish from beneath them. I think you made the right call in killing them all, personally,” he has such a simple, conversational tone, “good riddance to betrayers, maybe the council will think twice about such tactics the next time someone shows up to help.”
I tilt my head, “Are you compelled to answer?”
Ferdinand returns a simple, “Yes.”
I nod slowly, “Okay then. That's all for now, thank you.”
The ghost vanishes, and I head back to the bridge, the silence a little maddening, and wait for the controls to come back online so I can fly the ship again. They do, right on schedule, and I text my companions, “You can stop the salvage. The ‘Most Elevated’ set a trap: The soldiers they sent are all dead and I'm okay, but the ship's a mess… and also out of air. I'm going to park it a few miles from you guys and then come join you so it resets when next we rest up. Oh, and we're leveling up soon.”
I steer the ship where it needs to go, respond to texts, set down, and begin the easy hike across the barren moonscape….
