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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 4665519" data-attributes="member: 694">We’ve played a few more sessions, and some interesting developments have taken place.  As of this moment, Sprocket and Mira are still experience level 36/epic rank I, with 49/100 AP.       After the Expedition was launched into space, Sprocket put the ship into lunar orbit and took a small crew down to the moon’s surface in a shuttle.  Mira became the first person from Gaia to set foot on lunar soil.  They didn’t find anything more interesting there than moonrocks, though, so they left after a short while.     Next, they decided to shake down the FTL drive by plotting a lightspeed jump to Chronos, the sixth planet in the Gaian system, just to see what was there.  Taking the ship to “starspeed factor 1” (exactly lightspeed), they were in subspace for about half an hour before they transitioned back into realspace, not too far from Chronos.  The planet was a gas-giant, ringed and with a whole bunch of moons, but nothing that looked too worthwhile right away.     Incidentally, the engines on the Expedition’s stardrive have a cruising velocity of starspeed factor 5 (meaning 5^4[FONT=&quot]·[/FONT]C, or 625 times the speed of light) and a maximum velocity of starspeed 6 (6^4[FONT=&quot]·[/FONT]C, or 1,294 times lightspeed).  The engine is basically a warp drive: artificial gravity emitters positioned outside the ship can be activated to curve or warp spacetime in a bubble around the ship, transitioning the vehicle into a four-dimensional subspace, where the curvature or “warp bubble” can propagate through realspace at FTL velocities.  Within the bubble, the ship is stationary compared to its own reference frame, so it experiences no inertia, spatial compression, or time dilation.  The ship isn’t technically moving through space; the warp-bubble moves space past the ship.     In order to decide where to explore first, Captain Sprocket (yeah, he just went and made himself captain) ordered his science crew (there are about 500 people in total aboard the vessel) to take spectra of all the nearest stars, and pick out any that showed promising signs: yellow suns with signatures indicating water might be present somewhere in the system.  The closest of these proved to be a yellow star about 30 light-years due galactic west.  They plotted a jump, and this time, Sprocket ordered the pilot (a human from Utopia named Celes DuBois, who has been his pilot ever since he commissioned the airship Expedition) to take the ship all the way to starspeed 5.  The ship accelerated through each starspeed factor in turn, until they reached cruising speed.  (Sprocket wisely decided to not to push things and test the engines’ maximum speed yet.  As the DM, I can say that it would have been hilarious if he had, but you don’t get to the point where you have thirty-seven levels under your belt without being a little cautious at all the right times.)     En route, they picked up a distress signal from another ship not too far off of their course.  They dropped out of starspeed and found a derelict, long and rectangular, with most of its aft starboard side blown away.  There were life-signs aboard, though, so Sprocket and Mira assembled a boarding team and went exploring.       They found a ship that seemed deserted.  The hallways led them first to a cargo hold, where there were three dead bodies: two gray-skinned aliens that appeared to have circuitry running through their skin, and one vaguely humanoid blob of green slimy stuff.  The gray aliens had apparently died of burn-wounds to the chest; the green alien, of multiple bullet wounds.  (The gray aliens had submachine guns, while the green thing had a plasma blaster.  Sprocket took both kinds of guns, in order to learn how to replicate them.)       They explored further and found the med-bay.  Here, in a heavily armored quarantine chamber, three of the gray-skinned and becircuited aliens were locked in transparent cells.  They appeared to have been infected by something, because their skin was green and oozing, and they were all violent and incoherent.  Sprocket tried to use a “cure disease” on one of them, and it was fatal to the victim.  After that, they left and went to the bridge.  Here, the only thing they found was the ship’s computer, NIKA.  They learned that the starship was called the Eskai, and that it came from a planet called Aleer.  The Aleerin people were new to space exploration: the Eskai was their first FTL capable starship, and they had been heading to Gaia to meet its people!  Unfortunately, they were hit en route by something called the “Viral Pirates.”  The crew was fatally infected, and the computer, NIKA, sent out the distress call after the pirates left.  NIKA requested only that her computer core be retrieved from the chamber near the engine room.  (Eventually, Sprocket realized that NIKA sent the distress call on her own, to save herself, thinking the crew beyond help.  The realization that NIKA is an artificial intelligence with a self-preservation instinct has been disturbing, but it didn’t stop him from taking the computer core.)     They also discovered that while “cure disease” was always fatal, “heal” was only fifty percent fatal, so they set about saving which crew members they could.  Unfortunately, some were traumatized and insane, but one, an Aleerin called Officer Däz, joined Sprocket’s and Mira’s crew.  On the lower levels, the infected crew were shambling about like zombies, attacking anything that moved.  Sprocket and Mira ran past, pulled NIKA’s core, and got the hell out of Dodge.     Then Sprocket ordered the ship’s chaplain and the ship’s doctor (both high-level clerics) to go through the ship with an armed escort, “healing” all the infected crew.  The ones that died were simply “raised,” much to the astonishment of the Aleerins.  The Aleerins, as it turned out, were highly skilled with computer technology, but utterly confounded by magic.  After that, Sprocket towed the Eskai all the way back to Aleer, and as thanks, the Aleerins let him keep NIKA, and an officer exchange allowed Däz to stay aboard as Sprocket’s science officer.  Since the Expedition had been using an analytical engine (based on mechanical relays and vacuum tubes, and taking up an entire cargo bay) for its computations, installing NIKA multiplied the ship’s computing capabilities by several billion times!  Nevertheless, a few conversations with the AI have so far proven that it has no moral compunctions whatsoever.  About anything.  Except, perhaps, its own continued existence.     =========     Next, they plotted a 40-light-year jump to an interesting nebula, coreward and galactic west.  Here, they found glowing hot clouds of vaporous heavy metals, and about ten AUs into the nebula, a dodecahedral shape about five miles wide, made of some anomalous stone or metal.  Sprocket personally “teleported” into the object, where he found nothing but a rectangular stone box.  It turned out to be a casket with a millennia-dead alien inside, which Sprocket retrieved and tried to “raise.”  It didn’t work; the alien died again of old age.  But the ship’s chaplain used “resurrection,” but even this would only keep the alien alive for a few minutes.  Nevertheless, they learned that the alien was called a Fraal by the name of Grand Admiral Z’bin, and that this burial site was to commemorate his great victory over evil enemies in a space battle long ago.  The Fraal informed them that he had fought on behalf of a great civilization, the Free Empyrean Federation, against a terrible evil called the Cocytian Galactic Empire.  But with thousands of years of galactic drift at work, there was no way of telling where to find either the Federation or the Empire.  And then he expired again.     Now they turned the ship toward galactic east, but still coreward.  Another 40 light year jump took them to a jungle planet, where they met the primitive batlike aliens called Sesheyans.  Mira, who has that favorite “polymorph self” trick of hers, led the away team.  She took of the form of a Sesheyan in order to meet the people, where a tribal elder told her that their particular village was besieged by an invisible monster that stalks the night.  Mira played the part of a warrior from a distant village, and she took up the quest to slay the monster.   Traveling north of the village for half a day, she came to a cave, wherein lay an invisible beast of considerable size.  Mira used “truesight” and then “polymorph self” again.  She saw that the monster looked like a gargantuan four-jawed dinosaur thing, and she took a dragon form for herself.  The resulting battle dropped the beast in two breath weapons.     ==========     After this adventure, they plotted yet another course, this time galactic east and a little rimward.  It was 60 light years or so to the next planet, quite a journey all things considered.  Along the way, Sprocket continued working on his latest obsession, combining holograms with force fields in order to make “hard light” holography.  Anyway, en route their power systems became infected with some kind of microorganism that feeds on high-energy plasma, draining all power from their engines.  The microbes were actually inside the main fusion reactor, and when they shut it down, the things somehow migrated through the power conduits and into the backup reactor.  Sprocket simply disconnected the backup reactor, to isolate it, and then they found that they were able to start up the main reactor and go to starspeed again.  At the nearest sun (a 7 light-year detour), they jettisoned all the plasma in the backup reactor, sending the bugs out with it.     ==========     The next system they found was a trinary star system, with three stars all gravitationally bound, but far enough apart that each planet had its own “Goldilocks belt” and its own habitable planet.  The nearest world was a desert planet surrounded by a debris field, and populated by an advanced but very defensive race of orange-skinned humanoids.  They were called the Zidans, and they proved very eager to make any alliances they could with Sprocket and Mira.  As it turned out, their planet was a desert because it had been so frequently ganged up on and bombarded by the Orkans and the Kordans, the other two civilizations in the trinary system.      Sprocket managed to trade his knowledge of holograms and invisibility cloaks to the Zidans, in favor of particle shields and a superior stardrive design with a maximum velocity of starspeed 7 (2,401 times lightspeed).  While among the Zidans, Mira and Sprocket both noticed that these people were extremely religious, and they constantly offered prayers to a deity called Zida. Once they left and got back aboard their ship, Sprocket searched the planet for any sign of a crystal tower, similar to the one Bahamut had back on Gaia.  They found a crystal structure in the debris field circling the planet!  As it turned out, this immortal had put her palace on the planet’s only moon, but the moon had been destroyed by the Orkans and Kordans.  Zida was still alive, but she was weakened and unable to do anything about the Chaotic and evil immortals who ruled the other two planets in the system.     Our heroes realized that Bahamut had had some experience dealing with evil immortals in the past (he had defeated Tiamat back in the day and sealed her up in Gaia’s core, after all), so they decided to travel home to resupply, upgrade their technology, and learn what they could from Gaia’s chief immortal.  The course from the trinary system to Gaia was only another forty light-years or so, jumping rimward and galactic west: the maiden voyage of the starship Expedition, three months of game-time in execution, was one big circle… and, by and large, a successful mission!</blockquote>

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