Session One, Alternate Retelling: Insufficient Research Opportunities

As recounted long after the fact by Igneous

Winning a Space Battle Is Like Winning an Earthquake

Our ship, the Lip-Lip-Smakentime, had been conducting some amateur archeology when we somehow offended the Popo empire. Why was unclear. It wasn't their graves we were robbing. Perhaps they bore a grudge from some previous event.

We jumped into the warp and made for an obscure world our pursuers likely didn't have a map to. If they fell behind us by more than two geller-radii, they'd be stranded in the Warp.

They did not fall behind us. Instead they were right on our tail when we re-entered the Astral in an unfamiliar region.

An unfamiliar region filled with mines.

Did I mention that the warp-to-astral transition requires dropping shields?

Since we were in front, we got hit hardest. But they were bigger, so they got hit too. We attempted an all-stop, which only made them hit us. Which wasn't good for either ship.

So instead of studying a hold full of fascinating artifacts, I was at the side of the ship, jerry-rigging a rail-gun to provide just enough lateral thrust to get off the enemy's prow.

“Intruders on deck three,” the alarm warned us. Not my problem. Our crew is full of people who can kill boarders. Our crew is not full of people who can jerry-rig rail guns.

We got out from in front and the enemy ship went past us at high velocity, shields still down, plowing into the minefield. One problem down.

I stayed at the rail gun, trying to use it as a point-defense system to protect us from remaining mines. This was moderately effective, and our ship was nearly dead when it closed with the nearby crystal sphere. Just barely, I activated the hull and allowed us to pass through the sphere and into the atmosphere, which promptly ripped us apart.

A New World

There were supposed to be two emergency evacuation shuttles. Our captain had already used one (leaving him in the astral with a minefield, a crystal sphere he couldn't cross, a warp relay he couldn't use, and a severe lack of food and air – a poorly thought out act of cowardice). On the other hand, there was the boarding shuttle the Popo had arrived in, which I stole.

One good landing (they could walk away from it) and one great landing (I could use the shuttle again) later and we few survivors were on the ground. One bit of delayed falling wreckage later and I could no longer use the shuttle again.

I did have enough surviving comm gear to pick up an order for someone to locate and kill us. Friendly place.

More disturbingly, that comm net was the only signal of any sort. We'd landed on a low-tech world. No electronics. No scientific instruments. No way home.

At least the one Popo survivor, an inquisitor named Amira, decided to work with us for the time being.

Meet the Skylords

Given a few hours I probably could have gotten one of the shuttles working, but we didn't have that. Opting not to get caught in the open by people who wanted to kill us, we raced for the cover of a nearby forest.

The cover helped. Instead of a fair fight, we fought a series of ambushes. Two of our comrades were injured, but we prevailed.

The final step of the fight was eliminating their backup vehicle – a large van with a gunner seat on the roof. M'k teleported in and killed the driver, but panicked and teleported out rather than control the vehicle. The driver slumped on the steering wheel, and the van drove in ever accelerating circles.

I caught the van with a magnetic harpoon, a length of stretchy cable, and an improvised skateboard. Eventually I made it inside the van and pushed the break peddle. We had transport.

Transport that freaked M'k out. I offered to cauterize the brain tissue responsible for the phobia, an offer which helpfully distracted M'k. Fortunately I didn't have to go through with it. I knew a lot of biology, but I had no experience getting my hands dirty in actual bodies at the time.

We made it to a primitive village, where the locals told us about the “Skylords” whose van we'd stolen. They had the ability to fly and to drop bombs, which was enough to keep these locals entirely cowed. Still, they seemed to regard us as Skylords ourselves (we did, after all, come from the sky), so they were in a somewhat confused state. They offered us food, shelter, and a map to a village with a healer.

Finally having some downtime, I studied the captured Skylord commbeads. Standard unencrypted voice streaming over a generic network stack implementation that was ten years old, running a general purpose operating system that couldn't receive security updates. I pwned the entire system in minutes. The Skylords might have the peasants cowed, but I wasn't impressed.