Session Four: Time to Murder a Religion

From the logs of M'K'Splswap

Scene 1: He Be Gee Bees

Finding their Popo Empire police officer hostages bizarrely uninterested in joining a pirate crew, the party dropped them off on some out-of-the-way moon. M'k played a rather hilarious prank regarding a disappearing gifted cloak, and Igneous gave them a report about Orobas with instructions “give it to someone who might do something about it”. Then the crew were off towards Walimore, home of the space whale gods, there to kill one of them, should Vectron will it, which, well, duh. Lena, the fairy who'd started all this, had joined the party, despite their best efforts.

Something odd happened while navigating the Warp, leading to an outbreak of paranoia. Just about everyone on the ship thought that just about everyone else was plotting something horrible but nonspecific. Scarlett, affected first and most strongly, threatened to detonate the ship's mines, holding the rest of the crew hostage and unable to leave the bridge; luckily, Lena was able to sneak through the ventilation shafts and defuse the mine. Doktor ended up grappling with Scarlett, who struggled under the massive cybork to the point of exhaustion and finally unconsciousness.

The craziness seemed to spread, with Lena attempting to defuse the rest of the mines in fear of the rest pulling a Scarlett. Luckily, Captain Doktor, who was among the less affected, was able to realize that the recently-hired Redshirt Alta still seemed in possession of his faculties; Alta was appointed temporary Captain until sanity returned to the crew, or at least to Doktor Meetslab.

Sanity was indeed restored, at least to the party's questionable baseline, by the time we reached the Walimore portal relay. Exiting the Warp, we began to pick up radio chatter from a settlement we called Ork Zone. Ads for meat, along with something called "blood perfume", were as much enticement as was needed.

Scene 2: Welcome to Ork Zone

With the Bumbling Mark parked at the edge of Ork Zone's bubble of atmosphere, an expeditionary force dropped to the surface: Doktor, Igneous, M'k, and Lena.

Things immediately got interesting as Doktor crash-landed into the dwelling of the local chief, Biggum. The two orks, both of comparably extreme size, squared up to fight, and Doktor uppercut his podunk counterpark right off of the asteroid. Regrettably, Doktor was not quite able to parlay that victory into leadership of the locals, but we were free to inquire about the whales.

In the local tavern, the party gleaned some information about Susie, the whale god who regenerated endlessly, and Ragna-GrogaMak, the whale of destruction who attacked Susie unceasingly and whom we had come to kill -- Lena had not had a preference as to which whale would die, but they had told M'k that Susie was the Vectron-follower of the two, and besides, the whale of chaotic destruction seemed the less preferable to leave alive and unchecked. However, this being an ork tavern, there were several brawls that first broke out and needed resolution: the bartender we had been questioning quickly got in a fight with one rando, besting him, after which another called M'k an Elf. M'k returned the insult, and found himself parrying an axe blow and driving his spear home; the impaled rando was impressed, and peace was restored.

We learned that the orks hunted Susie for bits of valuable flesh and that the whales would pass by Ork Zone soon, among other useful details. We hatched a plan to lure Ragna-GrogaMak with blood perfume and kill him with mines; to this end we headed to the Blood Perfumery, where Doktor cleverly distracted the shopkeep by fighting him until he was dead.

The perfume acquired, we waited until we saw the whales approach. One, Susie, vast and slow, and the other, Ragna-GrogaMak, smaller than the Bumbling Mark and comparably fast, whirling around Susie and clawing off hunks of flesh. Orks leapt to catch the valuable blubber, many being lost to the Astral Sea in the process. We leapt into action, except that it was more of a series of measured bounces into action, given the microgravity.

Scene 3: Armbergrisly

Back in the Bumbling Mark, the team moved ahead of the whales and laid a trail of blood perfume, at the end of which we deployed all twenty-two remaining mines in a loose cluster.

As the whales approached, Igneous bowed to his urge to investigate, relying on his voidskin implant as he exited the airlock, attempting to send a camera drone down Ragna-GrogaMak's gullet.

The whale did not follow the trail of blood perfume.

Captain Doktor Meetslab ordered a ramming attack.

When we collided with the whale of destruction, Igneous was thrown free of the Mark, to his apparently certain doom. Stranded in vacuum, his voidskin running out of oxygen and with no shuttle to rescue him, Igneous disgorged a dangerous amount of explosive crystal from his bag of holding before climbing into the bag all but for one arm, which reached out of the bag and held a pistol -- his predictably insane plan being to explode himself back towards the airlock he had lost hold of, with the nearly impermeable artifact protecting him. His arm was vaporized instantly, but he had judged the angle nearly perfectly, and the bag of holding was bouncing neatly around the airlock as Alta rushed to retrieve it.

Scarlett, meanwhile, was at the helm as we faced a destructive million-pound cetacean chaos demiurge at point-blank range. Buttons and levers were pushed and pulled, respectively, as never before, and the Mark popped a U-ie in record time to beat Ragna-GrogaMak to the trap.

And, spoiler, it went right into the mines. Which went off. Boom, dead whale god. Except it was more of a minutes-long BOOOOOOM of twenty-two military-grade astral mines detonating simultaneously.

M'k spent a while staring at nothing and not saying much, but he was and is totally fine.

Our party snapped to their senses as they saw a variety of what are politely called astral anomalies as the structure of belief holding up Ragna-GrogaMak's existence was decapitated. Orks were sucked into the Warp as daemons appeared in their place, each daemon either snatching other orks back to the Warp or else proceeding to ravage the camp.