Brenna and I wash up (and get dirty again, and wash again…) in her tub, and I re-summon and re-equip, directing my minion from my ring form rather than doing a full possession this time. I… need to think. Brenna and I both head to the bridge where Alice and Charlene are… apparently watching a show on the big screen? Huh.
Alice greets us, “So… where next?”
Charlene shrugs, “I'm curious about the flying isnds of Orry.”
Brenna closes her eyes a moment, and mentally asks us, “Is that the one where the write-up includes ‘Unknown to most Orrians, artifacts from their golden age still exist,’ while being a very low-tech society with only a single spaceport and space station (both built by other races)?”
“The very same!” Charlene smiles, “Seems like a great pce to go exploring, given that gear we find doesn't seem to count against our wealth by level, and nobody will care about items everyone's forgotten exist.”
I shrug, “Should be as good of a pce to search as any. Let's do it.”
Alice nods and begins plotting a course, adding, “We can't enter the Drift from the surface, so mind…”
“Already on it,” Charlene smiles as she takes the controls and I power up the engines.
Soon enough we're back in space properly, Charlene has us at a dead stop with the engines off, and Alice has the Drift Engine running. The rainbow lights, the turned stomach, and we're back in the Drift, powering the engines back up, and then flying through the gargantuan empty void of warping pink-and-purple light patterns and shifting matterless clouds of mysterious energy that is the Drift.
We settle back into the shipboard routine, taking turns making UPBs in the industry, babysitting the bridge, maintaining the ship, and pursuing various entertainments. I limit my personal entertainment to the movie library for now… too much thinking to do. On the one hand… I'm a guy. So yes, I want a male form: That's what I'm supposed to have. It just feels right. On the other hand… ooh those sensations. Also, everyone on board likes the female form: As a woman, everyone on board is fair game: I can have pretty much anyone I want whenever I want, or near enough. As a man,though? Only Brenna wants to get it on with a man, and honestly she… wasn't exactly impressed with my performance.
After the thirteen days of travel, I still haven't settled on what I really want… but we are on the bridge, doing the ‘normal’ routine of switching realities. Rainbow lights, churning stomach, and done. Then we're powering the engines back up, engaging the cloak, and checking scanners.
Orry looks positively weird. There's ten massive swaths of nd, dozens of smaller ones… and no ocean between them. There's an anomaly that doesn't scan right at the core of what used to be a proper pnet, and the chunks of nd that the people of that world live on just… float around it. They don't bump into each other, and they keep a specific orientation retive to the core, so they get a consistent “down” and may as well be nd masses like anywhere else… except that they have no ocean shores (just a VERY long drop) and move retive to each other.
But we're not just nding there. That's… not permitted, and incredibly dangerous, although we could certainly get away with it thanks to our essentially invisible ship. Nah, we're going to the space station, Harmony-One, built by AbadarCorp.
Before we hail them to dock, however, Alice checks: “Hey Ferdinand.”
Our resident ghost manifests, “What can I do for you, Alice?”
“Do you have a hanger here, too?” Brenna signs.
“No…” he shakes his head, “...but I do have a standing contract with AbadarCorp for bookings on any station under their control. Here…” he talks me through how to submit the form, and in about half an hour, we're docking the ship with the station, not in a fully enclosed hanger, but securely connected and free to move between the ship and station whenever we like.
Before we go, Charlene speaks up, “if it's all right with you, David,” she smiles and bats her eyeshes, “I'd like you to keep me charged up for a bit. I have a fun trick I'd like to try.”
I possess my Companion solely so I can roll my eyes at her, “That's kind of why I took the spell… I can share. No problem.”
She starts summoning… and a few seconds ter, my mental radar shows someone, but I can't see anything. I frown as she expins, “Invisible Spell metamagic on a summon with both Greater Summoning and Lingering Companion. They'll stick around for a full twenty four hours, and will be invisible the whole time. I have a dozen Warrior tempte bipedal companions to fill out like that: A nice surprise for anyone trying to ambush us. Fill me back up? Oh, and if you use your female form, I'll let you use the touch spell on me wherever you want….”
I grin and get to it. Each one costs her four spell points, and I can only charge her up at a rate of one per round, so she casts and waits for me to charge her back up, over and over. Meanwhile, I do go for that deal, and enjoy holding her melons, spping her backside, and sliding my hand down the front of her pants for a good while. It ends up taking twenty minutes to summon them all, as she gets VERY distracted with some of the pces I hold her. We're both fully clothed the entire time, and I find I don't feel embarrassed by Alice and Brenna watching… it kind of makes it hotter, really, and they just smile knowingly. Lucky for us, Charlene's armor is made to be lived in for days, and is fully capable of dealing with a little moisture. Me? Token Spell cleans me right up, thanks to Charlene having it… and I go right back into ring form, for now, and have my summon wear me.
As we leave, we pass a Shirren AbadarCorp security guard… who raises one of her antenna at us: “Hold a moment…” and then speaks into our minds as the locust-like, aquamarine shelled humanoid walks over to us, “are you aware you're being stalked?” As she reaches us, she speaks verbally, “Welcome to Harmony-One. I'd like to make sure you're familiar with station rules…” and goes into a very clearly memorized speech that she needs to pay no attention to whatsoever.
Which of course, leaves her free to hear us just fine as we talk telepathically, “They're bodyguards; we've been ambushed coming off ship before,” Brenna informs the woman.
The guard nods, and adds, “That's fine then. Just be aware that there are a lot of people who can get around sight-based invisibility to various degrees, and any attempt at breaking station w by such means will end poorly.”
The prepared speech finishes with, “...and thank you for visiting an AbadarCorp facility. Good day, and have a safe and profitable visit.”
We wave as the rep leaves, and go about our business… which is booking a shuttle down to the pnet… well, pnet-like thing. Now, knowing we won't be coming back to the ship for quite some time, we're carrying all of the spare UPBs we made on the trip with us, so they don't end up lost in space when the ship, mechs, and all of the gear from our wealth-by-level that we left behind reforms nearby when we rest. We of course make very sure that the station-side airlock doors are secured before we leave.
The AbadarCorp station itself has a solid, pragmatic design with a clear eye for security. The windows are all made of a yellow tinted translucent ceramic, and there is rich ornamentation everywhere (mostly focused on the various things that Abadar embodies: Civilization, Commerce, Law, and Wealth). We pass a cssroom where they're holding courses on finance… they don't charge for them… many, many stores, and a few banks. Really, though, it's all the same bank and same store: AbadarCorp. They're just different outlets.
We stop at one of the banks and trade our UPBs for credsticks (they're more convenient to carry) with a gray-skinned teller with solid bck eyes and four arms: A Kasatha. Hmm… maybe I should get a few extra arms for my summon? Eh… next level, maybe; it's something I will need to think about, as extra arms are much less useful in Starfinder than they are in Pathfinder.
We purchase shuttle tickets for ourselves (there's only one safe nding zone on the pnet-like thing beneath us, which means going in stealthily is not a great call), and Charlene temporarily dismisses her summons. We wait… board the shuttle, sit down amidst a few dozen other seats… wait… the ship unches… we wait… the ship nds… we get the all clear to exit, and we get up and out… onto a spaceport that's serviced by wagons pulled by shaggy, brown-furred, six-legged draft animals: It's quite the disconnect; the tech level difference is insane. These people are basically working in the eighteen hundreds or so… at the test. Trade will eventually fix that, but… wow.
I shake my head, and we download maps on our personal comms… which are basically smartphones. The mapping app should even stay rgely up to date, as all of the ‘continents’ and ‘isnds’ floating around move in predictable patterns (and never collide).
After we're all set, Alice signs (because there's other people around), “So what's the pn for hunting the artifacts we want to find?”
“Oh, that's simple,” Charlene smiles as she signs back, “a lot of them interfere with magical and technological flight: It's what makes it incredibly dangerous to nd anywhere other than here. So we just use a magically flying summon or a technologically flying mech as an indicator.”
I nod, and join in, “I get it… when it falls, we mark the point on the map, back up, move a bit, and map out the border of the no-fly zone. We're likely to get something like a circle, and just need to check the center if we do.”
“That's the pn,” Charlene confirms as she re-summons her posse (with the 24-hour setup, the caster is free to dismiss and re-summon them for free for the duration after the first summoning). Charlene gives some orders, one of the invisible minions flies up into the air, we pick a direction, and off we go down a road of some dark material none of us can actually identify, all that remains of the once great civilization… as far as anyone knows.
As it starts to get dark and the stars start to come out, we stop and make camp: Not because any of us need sleep, but because taking an eight hour break will give us access to the ship… but more importantly to our mechs, which can fly much faster than the summons. Now, for us, “making camp” isn't much: We don't eat, sleep, or even sweat, so we basically just set the summons to stand watch and look out at the stars, py games on our personal comm units, idly chat, or otherwise do nothing of note. Eight hours of that, and we refresh our resolve points, spell points, spell slots, and so on… although I keep us topped off on all of those things, so those don't matter. We really only need to rest to revive a Conjuration Companion or - as is the goal here - get our stuff back.
I get to watch the procession of the reforming fully: The ship just sort of fades in, but not all at once. It starts appearing a few feet away, the bow of the ship facing us and forming first, becoming more real while the portions farther away start fading in, with the stern of the ship arriving st. Once it's fully done, we climb in, set the cloak, unpack the mechs, get out, close everything up (leaving it cloaked) and go flying.
