Session Five: The Stolen Heart

From the logs of M'K'Splswap

Scene 1: Potluck

The Bumbling Mark hurtled towards the Walimore portal relay, away from the chaos of Ork Zone. Somehow, Lena snuck away from the ship, choosing for inscrutable fairy reasons to remain among the assailing daemons and hapless orks.

M'k decided this was the best time to summon a great store of luck from the Warp, which worked incredibly well, except that he was still unlucky while casting the spell, which released a burst of corrupting energy that spoiled nearly all of the ship's food, including the whale-god meat. Two days' worth of unspoilt rations remained.

M'k then spent the entirety of his significant magical luck on navigating a shortcut through the Warp, which he again announced was a great success, with surely a day at most remaining.

By the time thirty more hours had passed, the party feared that they were stranded far more deeply than they'd thought -- in time, if not, as M'k insisted, in space -- and began to plan drastic measures against starvation. Doktor Meetslab, characteristically bullheaded and drunk on notions of Captainly duty, insisted that he would sever his gigantic left arm, his only limb still made of living meat, asking that M'k attempt regenerate it afterwards (M'k explained that he didn't actually know those magics, but offered to give it "the old Vectron try"). Meetslab had practically started the procedure himself when his crew convinced him to let Igneous first attempt necrogastronomic rescue of the putrid alien blubber.

Igneous gave a long description of how he had determined which of the god-meat's ineffable theomolecular components could perhaps still be nutritious, as well as how he planned to isolate them. This description contained such words and phrases as "lipid", "aromatic profile", "water-soluble", and "centrifuge". Not knowing all of those presumably normal culinary terms, we let Igneous do his thing.

The end result, a grey and viscous sludge, was tentatively fed to our most durable member; Meetslab pronounced it edible, if awful, and we proceeded to sate our hunger, choking it down with queasy gusto, and settled to wait out the duration in buoyed spirits.

After our second large meal in which we gorged ourselves on sopping waves of bizarre ashen goop cut with scraps of space rat jerky and adamantine Orkish hardtack, Igneous excused himself from the table and wasn't seen for the rest of the day, and then for much of the next. Though he was eventually coaxed from his quarters, he continued to act oddly, making several disconcerting comments along the lines of destruction being the true nature of the universe.

Scene 2: Ghost Town

We put this out of our minds as Centuria's portal array came at long last into view. Relieved to find nary a traffic robot on other side, let alone the Popo super-dreadnaught we'd feared, we puttered along to a world with little imperial presence, docking and emerging in the meager downtown of a small provincial city that somehow managed to be even emptier than it had looked on Wheelkipedia.

Igneous, still trickling blood from his stump arm but as flush with cash as the rest of us, quickly acquired and attached a serviceable bionic replacement, which he apparently preferred over letting M'k attempt to improvise regeneration of the original.

Doktor and M'k, meanwhile, went out to find medicine and drugs, as well as looking to bolster the ever-threadbare crew. They succeeded in finding bio-foam, failed at finding drive, and managed to sign one recruit, the roguish halfling Aephyr.

The three were interrupted in their return to the Mark by a nattily-dressed Tau; he gave the impression of being some sort of functionary, political or military or somewhere in between. He spoke charmingly but guardedly, revealing only his last name, Bond, and that he worked for the Glorious Tau Empire (hyperbolic appellation decidedly his). Tau Bond explained that the town had emptied in search of a key to an old Human Empire outpost, which had recently been stolen from something called a Keyhoarder by someone called Lexical Scribs, who had then fled taken to a certain ominously-named crystal sphere. This sphere, the Realm of Dust and Tears (!!!), was apparently quite close by, hence the gold rush. Bond had similar designs, but had been unable to secure transportation, and proposed that he would travel with us, that he would retrieve the key, and that the rest of us would receive a reward from the Glorious Tau Empire's outpost in the Centuria sphere.

By this time the party had regrouped at the Bumbling Mark, along with Aephyr and Bond. Hoping, Vectron willing, to at least acquire enough funds to upgrade our ship with actual weapons, we decided to join the hunt.

Scene 3: Zip In, Unzip; or, Dust and Tears and Lust and Bears

We navigated to the Realm of Dust and Tears; not having been apprised that the sphere was a mere two kilometers in diameter, we overshot it entirely, continuing straight back into the Warp before coming around and in again. We had good positioning to perform an active augery, which identified a light frigate with two beings inside and another two running into it. We also saw a massively powerful heavy plasma cannon aboard the small Sultana-grade ship, along with a complement of murder servitors to render a boarding attempt nearly suicidal. Despairing of our chances if forced to fight unarmed in our wounded jalopy against this vessel, and seeing that we had been spotted, we very generously asked Vectron to bless their souls before Igneous and Tau began firing on the still-running pair, lest they contributed enough manpower to operate that cannon. Igneous flipped a switch on his extensively-modded lasgun and fired, dispatching one grotesquely, the distant form's arm seeming to practically evaporate. Tau dropped the second, who didn't get up, either dead or thoroughly stunned.

It was at this point that we spotted a dozen or so beings perhaps two hundred meters away from us, among them a giant stuffed bear, a matching slightly-less-giant octopus, and an imposing humanoid in a ten-gallon hat. Inferring that this was the rest of the crew whose members we had just attacked on somewhat less than unimpeachable grounds, we found ourselves embroiled in quite a more significant firefight than we'd anticipated.

Our melee team rushed forwards, M'k teleporting ahead and Doktor Meetslab thundering after, Aephyr riding piggy-back to shield himself from the gunfire that pocked Meetslab's skin like hail taking paint off an armored car. Aephyr probably would have been alright on his own: our opponents instinctively concentrated their fire on the gigantic, screaming ork. Energy weapons, automatic fire, and the occasional sharper crack of a high-powered rifle.

As Tau and Igneous started to pick off targets, Tau took a glancing shot to the back of the head, but recovered quickly, slurring, "Icantakeit". The pair searched behind them, which is to say they looked around the ship and glanced at the kilometer or so of hard, dusty, perfectly-flat, and obviously-empty desert. Wary, but with no better options, they resumed fire. Igneous flipped another switch, this one hot-glued to a nest of wires above his trigger guard, and pulled the trigger. The octopus exploded. Tau took his time aiming, then put a bullet through that ten-gallon hat, which dropped, along with its wearer, to the dust.

M'k, having crossed the distance in a handful of blinks, attempted diplomacy, our fire ceasing as M'k appeared in the line of fire with his hands in the air, them lowering weapons in response. Ten-gallon hat rose, unexpectedly alive, with a pained spasm, and identified himself as Captain Stern of the spelljammer BATNA. He was for some reason less than completely sanguine; our own captain soon caught up and took charge. Meetslab, M'k, and Aephyr stood in a row, facing down Stern, the nine-foot cloth bear, three redshirts, and one more man out of uniform, who wore a black cloak under a black wide-brimmed hat and carried an ancient-looking blunderbuss.

"Surrender your weapons and you ship, and will let you live."

"Not happening. You idiots. You have no idea what you've gotten yourselves into."

M'k chimed in, smiling without guile. "Winning a fight?"

"We've both suffered losses -"

"Yes", interjected Doktor, "You lost...eight men. I lost several of my best pimples." He looked himself over. "You must have shot a thousand rounds at me. But bygones can be bygones. We have bio-foam, which we will share as a gesture of good faith, if you will negotiate."

Stern nodded agreement, but our captain did not like what he saw in his counterpart's eyes.

"I must step away to talk to my crew. Perhaps some bio-foam we must reserve for our own."

Meetslab audibly requested a sitrep as he strode a dozen meters away, plotting a course that didn't impede our sharpshooters, then more quietly began assigning targets to be engaged on his command. As he returned, he suddenly broke into a sprint as he gave the designated signal at about two hundred decibels: "WAAAAAGH!"

The crew of the BATNA were clearly prepared for treachery, their weapons still at hand, but they were still staggered by the furious truckload of ork. All were too stunned to respond in time, except for one redshirt who was literally blinded by fear and defiance and who raised his weapon and fired, screaming, at random, unloading an entire magazine into his captain, killing the poor bastard for the second time that day.

Aephyr, viper-quick, relieved hat-and-cloak of his blunderbuss, while Tau and Igneous killed the final two redshirts with one shot apiece.

Captain Stern recovered again, his wounds having pinched shut, twitching as he slowly rose. Doktor lunged with his greathammer to put down the revenant before he could even stand, dealing another mortal blow.

The bear raised its hands, mirroring the disarmed sniper, and the violence stopped as quickly as it had started.

The enemy sniper, grizzled and ugly up close, proposed that he and "Patches" leave in their ship. We declined, and the sniper's weapons, blunderbuss and pistol, leapt to his hands before any of us could react; a classic M'k'sican standoff.

Stern lurched awake again. The enemy sniper aimed his pistol and killed him again, eyes and other weapon still trained on the rest of us.

Stern didn't stay down for a minute this time. His body was no longer regenerating, but flesh poured from his gaping wounds, bathtubs worth of grasping limbs and variaby ragged or flayed or scaly or razor-sharp skin.

The bear, Patches, started running.

The rest of us hacked away at legs and tentacles and wings, making little progress, until Aephyr tore open a gaping wound near where Stern's chest had been. Doktor waded into the now meters-wide living morass, reaching into the gap where the torrent was fiercest. He struggled, using all his strength, and pulled loose a still-beating heart made of a metal that hurt to look at. The mountain of flesh went still.

After we paused to react to that with dumbfounded silence, the sniper again suggested that he be allowed to leave in his ship. We stared at each other.

Our own sniper team could see all this, and Igneous commed in to say that they had a shot, asking whether they should hold fire. Doktor kept quiet; it took one shot each from Tau and Igneous, and we were alone, watching Patches escape.

M'k magically hailed the bear, suggesting that he should stop and negotiate or else be cut down as well. This had the desired effect, but the bear was still reticent; he wouldn't join our crew, and he wouldn't give us the codes needed to access the BATNA and disable the servitors.

The party began to discuss options, but drew silent as Tau Bond walked slowly towards the patchwork beast, straightening his posture and smoothing his hair.

The two were just out of earshot, and wouldn't say anything after, but we clearly heard the words, "Hey, baby, what's ursine?", followed at length by the sound of a heavy-duty zipper, revealing a human dollomancer within.

Patches returned, arm in arm with Tau, and gave us the keys to our new ship: the BATNA. The people we killed conveniently left a bunch of explosives that we used to blow up the entrance of the temple. We left Patches in charge of looking out for the ship.