Silver Lining:In Pitch Dark I Go Walking in Your Landscape

<episodenavigation> name=In Pitch Dark I Go Walking in Your Landscape date=4/15/2022 episodenumber=1 </episodenavigation>

Characters Introduced

PCs

1. Anton Florin Vasille - free spirited vagabond looking to see the universe
2. Harris - a doctor with a mysterious criminal past.
3. Ray aka U. Raynaud Tephford - A master mechanic; Charlie Daniels with a torque wrench.
4. Seth Black - the new guy on board, and the ship's new pilot.

NPCs

1. Silver Lining - The light freighter the PCs use to get around the stars
2. John Carlos - Owner of the Silver Lining

Locations

1. Arcturus Station - A massive space station of almost 250,000 people in the Arcturus system. The session starts here.
2. Sargas - A planet where the PC's job will take them

Organizations

1. Rabbit Couriers - A shipping and deep space communications contractor. They have a courier ship that's gone missing on its regular trip to Sargas.

Cold Open

Turn down lights, set bookshelf LED to "Twinkles" preset.

Begin reading this at the start of lyrics. The 5th paragraph should be timed with the song lyrics "there's always siren singing you to shipwreck".

You're floating in the cold void of space, between your ship and the broken remains of another. Debris is scattered all about, and you do your best to carefully ease your way through it. To make matters worse, as you approach the center of the debris field, you enter a bubble of vapors that swirl around the wreckage, and your zero-g suit's visor is covered in a thin layer of oil and water.

You finally get a good look at the wreckage in front of you - the back of the ship shows signs of a massive hull breach - from this distance you can't see a cause just yet, but a hole of this size would be enough to take out a ship - and its crew.

The crew - you can see the outline of something bobbing gently around, close to the opening. You're pretty sure it's a body, and not someone on EV or somone expecting to suddenly exposed to vacuum for that matter.

So there's your first obstacle, the body in the way. You steel yourself against the thought, fearing what you're going to find.

"Hey now," you hear your boss call over the comm, "be careful, there's always a siren singing in a shipwreck."

"Now you tell me" you think to yourself as enter the heaviest part of the debris field.

"Too dangerous to take the ship too close" is what you were told. Part of you wonders if maybe they're just hazing you or something. Muttering under your breath you finally get within an armlength of the hull and grabbing on toone of the many built-in hand holds as though your life depended on it. You attach a safety harness and let out a sigh.

"On the hull. Heading to inspect the opening."

"Opening!" a voice quips over the comm. "that's a hell of thing to call it."

You lift yourself across the ship's exterior to the hole - just wide enough for two people to barely squeeze through. A mangled corpse suddenly floats up into your helmet light. It's a gruesome sight, missing an arm, half the torso - what's left of the head is somehow attached still. That he body is frozen solid and not a pile of tepid goo is one small relief you can take away.

"Made contact. ID unknown. Deceased. From an explosion I guess."

"What are they wearing?"

"That's an odd question."

"No, it's not, what are they wearing."

"Uh... clothes?" you wince a little as you do your best to look but not LOOK. "Maybe... a tank top and shorts?"

You fumble a bit with the unfamiliar controls of the suit and the light on your helmet flashes brighter as you do your best to snap a photo, then gently push the body back into the ship for a better view inside.

You peer down into the opening, a black, inky darkness, and brighten your helmet lights. Despite having just pushed the corpse down there, the fresh light illuminating it still manages to startle you a bit. You probably won't get that image out of your head for a while.

"What part of the ship is that?"

"Donno" you mutter back. "I see computers and... blown off access panels. Holy shi-"

A warning alarm sounds over the helmet communicator

"FUCK! Contact. Coming up from the surface. 5 minutes out." 

"Get back here now!" you hear panic in your boss' voice.

"What?"

"GET. BACK. HERE. NOW."

You scramble away from the derelict and fire your EV jets in the direction of your ship.

"Hey there, whoever you are. You turn over that pretty ship of yours or we'll have to blow it from under you. You have 3 minutes til we get there... so, surrent or we start shooting" a stranger calls out.

Scene 1 - Introducing The New Guy

Location - Arcturus Station

John Carlos sits before you, looking over the resume you provided. He is a large man with very short cut greying hair.

"Well, everything seems fine I guess. And Harris vouches for you, and we both know Harris is a tough guy to impress." He rubs his unshaven jowls and sighs. "Well, the pay is terrible and the work sucks, but... welcome to the crew. Do you have your own space suit?" you do not "Okay, then let's get you one.

The Silver Lining is currently docked at Arcturus Station, here to refuel, resupply and find work.

The station is a massive circular structure orbiting the star Arcturus, 37 Light years from earth. Since it was first built 30 years ago, a Hodge-podge of additional structures and modules have been added, creating a labyrinthine living space that holds almost 250,00 people. Only 3 jumps from Theta Boo Arcturus Station, all species of the United Worlds can be found here.

You follow John to from the docks to the open market. He walks laboriously with a cane through the crowded market place towards a ship with several different brands and styles of EVA suits.

The shopkeeper, a diminutive Macedonian looks up from a small computer console he has open on a workbench. He sets down his tools and calls out "Anything I can help you gentlemen with?"

John: Looking for a space suit.

Shopkeeper: I don't think I've got anything quite in your size, sir.

*record scratch sound*

Scene Break

Now is a good time to see if there's anything the PCs want to do/are looking for on Arcturus. Find out where they are, what they are doing and the kinds of things the would do when they show up on a station like this.

This is also the time for the PCs to introduce themselves, and for them to meet the new guy, and for the new guy to get situated and familiar with the ship. They are several weeks out of their last docking. During this time, John is checking around with people he knows in this area for job leads.

Scene 2 - Finding Rabbit Courier 13

A few hours later, John calls together the crew to brief them on a job he has found.

A Rabbit Couriers ship is two weeks overdue (so really, it's about a month or more late) in reporting in after what was supposed to be a 3 month round-trip circuit from Arcturus to Sargas, and then returning along a different route.

The Silver Lining has been contracted by the Rabbit Couriers to 1. find the ship, 2. render aid if necessary, 3. if the ship is a loss, they are to conduct recovery operations on the ship's Strong Box, along with any accessible computer core dumps, recovering any bodies, 4. performing a cursory investigation into cause and 5. leave behind a lagan buoy in the debris field order to mark the wreckage site as property of the Rabbit Couriers.

The PCs can choose one of two routes to go - following the original route the ship took, or going counter that route. Because interstellar communication is something that takes months, there are no good clues as to which would be the more efficient route to take.

The last communication the Company received was dated 2 months ago, which doesn't say much. Since it can take weeks for messages to make thier way back, and any communications on the return route would be carried by the returning vessel itself, it isn't unusual for a ship like this to have several months of operations 'in the dark' while it returned home.. This communication came via another mail/courier vessel that apparently encountered them. The contents of that communication, a manifest showing the crew, passengers and their origination and planned destination ports, as well as cargo and it's pickup and drop-off points can be found below:

Manifest:
Dt: 2353-06-11T23:33:05Z
DtCd: EUTC
Ship Detail:
	Name: Rabbit Courier 13
	Ship Model: Marsworks CX-3
	Serial: CX17524CCSZX23
	Owner: CourierWays PLC, London, UK Stellar, Earth
	Registry: Alpha Centauri
Crew Detail:
	Captain: Joseph Hunter
	Executive Office: Sudhai Presad
	Flight Engineer: Neema Juma
	Flight Engineer: Zev Halkam
	Load Master: Xun Lian
	Load Master: Maddy Loren
Passenger Detail:
	Passenger 1: Sayeed Mohammad
		Embark: Arcturus
		Disembark: Sargas
	Passenger 2: Hanan Mohammad
		Embark: Arcturus
		Disembark: Sargas
	Cargo Manifest:
		100 lb Crate
			Loaded: Stop 1
			Destination: Arcturus
		20 lb Box
			Loaded: Stop 2
			Destination: Arcturus
		20 lb Box
			Loaded: Stop 2
			Destination: Sargas
		10 lb Box
			Loaded: Arcturus
			Destination: Sargas
		5 lb Box
			Loaded: Arcturus
			Destination: Sargas
		3 lb Box
			Loaded: Stop 3
			Destination: Stop 5
		1 lb Box
			Loaded: Stop 3
			Destination: Stop 5
		Envelope
			Loaded: Arcturus
			Destination: Stop 5
		Envelope
			Loaded: Arcturus
			Destination: Stop 6
		Envelope
			Loaded: Stop 2
			Destination: Stop 7

Sargas is the fourth stop in the transit. Arcturus is stop 1 and stop 8. This communication, then, came some time after the ship had stopped at stop 3, but before making it to Sargas.

Some additional details the PCs could possibly find:

Personal messages send from members of the crew - this would involve somehow getting the info Arcturus' central mail processing servers. this would be Hard task to accomplish.

Musical Inspiration
Song:	There There
Artist:	Radiohead
Album:	Hail to the Thief
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