rolled 5, 2, 13, 8, 3, 7, 2, 9, 20, 1, 14, 11, 11, 6, 6, 7, 4, 9, 2, 2 = 142

---

>>1119126
Cricket Moon is a disheveled jumble on the control room floor when the rest of her party finds her.
"You need chain pods to reach all the controls properly" she says weakly.
Once she's recovered, she tries to help Reiko figure out how to stabilize the ship and get the take off zone safe.

One level of intellect effort.

>>1119206
>"You need chain pods to reach all the controls properly" she says weakly.
"You can fly, can't you? Though on second thought, your restraint in keeping the controls from getting wet is reasonable caution."

>>1119095
>double checks to ensure the mimics fled the scene,
>rolled 10, 13
Reiko doesn't see anything in or near the passage tube which could plausibly be a mimic, apart from maybe the extendable floor grating itself. Given that Cricket walked along the whole length without being attacked, such a possibility seems remote. Mimics of this type would take five or six minutes to cross that distance at the slug/inchworm equivalent of an all-out combat sprint (whereas a reasonably athletic human could do so in 20-30 seconds), or at least an hour if they were being at all sneaky. As such, perimeter seems secure for the moment.
>then rushes to the ship
>rolled 8
Gravity spotlight is still active.

>>1119126
>Cricket certainly succeeded in making entrance easier.
She simplified step 2 of entry from "fly or jump onto the roof of a ten-story building" down to an approximately horizontal gap that someone could reasonably hop across with a running start, or bridge with a portable ladder,
>rolled 7, 5
...but step 1 hasn't yet been fully resolved.
>Let's try and ensure no mimics migrate into what we can hope is a mimic-free space?
>rolled 10
If that spotlight has been keeping them out all this time, it probably still can. Main risk is infiltrating as supplies when those get loaded onboard.
>rolled 20
After a few more frustrating minutes pinned to the deck by unnaturally amplified weight, Nat doubles back to the reception desk, where the automated incident report compilation process has apparently initiated...
>Cricket Moon is a disheveled jumble on the control room floor when the rest of her party finds her.
>"You need chain pods to reach all the controls properly" she says weakly.
...a video call with one of the key parties responsible.
>>1119206
>Once she's recovered, she tries to help Reiko figure out how to stabilize the ship and get the take off zone safe.
>One level of intellect effort.
>rolled 5
That sort of tricky maneuvering would best be attempted from the main bridge, which Cricket realizes she's not actually in. Based on video call's captions, the ship is classified as a mineral-prospecting scout, and this control room is for the drill.

rolled 12, 4, 3, 19, 10, 16, 4, 17, 2, 3, 14, 18, 4, 12, 16, 9, 17, 14, 19, 12 = 225

---

Reiko groans and lugs her way back to the chainpods - and tests each of them for signs of being replaced by mimics or worse. She quickly pilots one of the chainpods (others in tow) back to the loading dock.

"Okay, where's our entry point? Around the ceiling, or across the hull?"

rolled 8, 6, 7, 19, 16, 17, 18, 18, 1, 6, 13, 1, 12, 16, 17, 13, 9, 6, 3, 1 = 207

---

>After a few more frustrating minutes pinned to the deck by unnaturally amplified weight
"I suppose we were premature to assume the path was clear," Natalina sulks. "Any desire I might have ever had to visit the Slant Milieu has been quite disabused."

>...a video call with one of the key parties responsible.
"Are you quite all right?"

>Okay, where's our entry point?
"We... could approach this like the laak and barm river-crossing riddle. Reiko, you could pilot a chainpod at range, couldn't you?"

Assuming Reiko linked with the chainpods for the purposes of her Machine Bond power: Natalina could use the augmech remote controls to have the barbot carry Reiko to the ship. So long as Reiko focuses on something else, there will be no intent to trigger the spotlights. Then, Reiko can remote-drive chainpod(s) with Natalina and Paprika onboard, and so long as they're distracted, there should again be no detectable intent (...she just conceived a plan where makeouts would increase the likelihood of success. Should she be proud of that?).

Applying Understanding to applicable rolls.

rolled 11, 17, 9, 4, 13, 2, 2, 1, 14, 3, 1, 13, 12, 7, 12, 11, 6, 5, 1, 14 = 158

---

>Looks like there's a ring of emitters, maybe six or seven spaced evenly around the hatch. No more than one of them lit up at a time, though. Might be able to disable the whole system by severing that ring?
Would focusing on destroying the ring count as intent to enter the ship? Could I just walk up and hack the ring apart with my windslice spear?

Failing that, Paprika will politely ask her conundary friend if it can do something about the gravity turret. "If you can help us onto that ship, we'll get you whatever food you need! We'll get you food anyway, but we really need this."

>>1119506
>Would focusing on destroying the ring count as intent to enter the ship? Could I just walk up and hack the ring apart with my windslice spear?
>rolled 11, 17

While Reiko and Natalina are arguing over a complex multi-step plan involving rigging an autopilot for one of the chainpods, Paprika simply walks up to the fallen behemoth's underbelly and chops a notch into the docking ring.

The ship is yours; it has no further noteworthy active defenses. However, until that seal is repaired, slow air leak means the hangar bay will be depressurized shortly after you're away from the dock - an hour at most. Atmospheric entry might instead see that space temporarily filled with fire.

Further unfortunate news is that said hangar bay serves as hub between the ship's four habitable internal sections. Engine room and main cargo connect to each other directly, but if you want to move between the engine room and the bridge, or the bridge and the crew quarters, only apparent options are traversing the hangar bay, or phasing through a wall. To cross between any of those and the control room where Cricket is, even wall-phasing isn't really an option - best case it would take hours, and there's energetic machinery in the way.

Similar to Zone Ivory's access points to the rest of the Giant's Tomb, this nightcraft's internal doors can stay airtight while allowing a chainpod through, so that isn't a totally unworkable situation... but it'll surely be inconvenient somehow.

Everybody gets 2 xp for reaching and unlocking the ship.

Internal layout, clockwise from the route Cricket started with, each arrow is an airtight door:
hangar => spinal power conditioning maintenance access => main drill control room (Cricket is here)
hangar => crew quarters (upper plaza) => crew quarters (lower maze) => storm shelter / cold storage
hangar => decon hall (not for pedestrians) => main cargo => portside sensor tusk access
----------------------------------------------main cargo => engine room => drive halo exterior access (emergencies only)
----------------------------------------------main cargo => starboard sensor tusk access
hangar => external comms / navigation => neural interface throne

rolled 11, 6, 16, 6, 7, 13, 1, 7, 18, 16, 14, 9, 1, 15, 1, 5, 14, 4, 16, 17 = 197

---

Reiko wanders from room to room, sniffing around for a control panel or obscure access point she can hack into. After a few minutes, she finds one hiding inside the neural interface throne room. Rather than linking to the interface, she links her implant to the neural translators instead.

A few minutes are spent walking in the ship's sub-datasphere, until Reiko comes across a large library file. It's dictionary that attempted to categorize various numenera according to their inherent functions and sub-processes related to those functions. Though the file is grossly wrong in some aspects, there's an effective scientific methodology that the file adheres to analyzing numenera, one which the implant allows Reiko to adopt.

[4 XP - Understanding Numenera]

Once finished, Reiko runs various queries on the ship's status; how well it has detected the hull breach, where the other hull breaches are, how much fuel the ship has, if the ship can scan its surroundings for the fuel it needs, how the ship maintains life support, if it even has life support, etc. She spends max effort, pushing her concentration to ensure that she has a fully accurate status report to print out and shove in Natalina's face.

rolled 19, 19, 19, 16, 15, 20, 10, 20, 12, 7, 15, 4, 6, 16, 6, 6, 3, 5, 1, 5 = 224

---

Okay, once they're all safely within the hangar, they have a few mission priorities:
1) Secure the hangar for safe habitation
2) Figure out ship controls
3) Repair damage to ship and hangar
4) Fly off and shoot things that are bad?

For my initial intrusion xp, I award... uhh, lets say Paprika, for good hustle getting the rest of the team in.
Then, I need to purn some so I don't overflow. Should have done this earlier, meant to, and then forgot.
4xp to train with armor, reducing the speed penalty by one, and 4xp to train another noun of my tier or lower- that'll be "Find the Way" from Delve.

For mechanical actions, I... don't actually really know the best way to go about advancing my objections. I think that results in Cricket Moon following Reiko around, a bit subdued, trying to learn about the ship and help her get familiarized as well. One level of intellect effort.

rolled 12, 2, 12, 10, 19, 2, 19, 16, 16, 18, 14, 19, 15, 18, 17, 19, 8, 9, 13, 9 = 267

---

Spending 8XP to move Paprika up to Tier 4. Here are my purchases:

Advancement track purchases:
- Extra Effort [4XP]
- Increasing Capabilities (+4 speed pool) [4XP]

T4 Glaive selections:
- Skill With Attacks - Medium Ranged
- Amazing Effort (Might)

T4 Focus selection:
- Nanotech Resistance (Alternative to the halo of fire T4 power. Described on Numenera Discovery page 333)

Paprika's already taken to calling Nat "Captain."

"Captain! Permission to sweep the ship for hostile lifeforms?" She'll start with the crew quarters, exploring all the way to the storm shelter / cold storage. After that, she'll look around for EVA equipment since she'll likely be the one performing space walks. Drive halo exterior access seems the most likely starting point?

rolled 20, 6, 7, 3, 6, 11, 17, 18, 8, 5, 8, 9, 18, 12, 11, 12, 5, 18, 16, 6 = 216

---

>Paprika simply walks up to the fallen behemoth's underbelly and chops a notch into the docking ring.
>The ship is yours; it has no further noteworthy active defenses. However, until that seal is repaired, slow air leak means the hangar bay will be depressurized shortly after you're away from the dock - an hour at most. Atmospheric entry might instead see that space temporarily filled with fire.
"Um, good work, love. Reiko, would you be a dear and look into what we need to make the ship vacuum-worthy again?"

>to ensure that she has a fully accurate status report to print out and shove in Natalina's face
"I'm sorry, have I offended you?"

>"Captain! Permission to sweep the ship for hostile lifeforms?"
"Granted," Natalina answers, with an indulgent smile.

>What do
First priority is the controls for the door we're using- it would be good to close it behind us to prevent any (hopefully unintelligent) mimetans or anything else from wandering onboard with the spotlight system offline.

If the decon hall isn't safe to traverse on foot, that "branch" can wait until we double back for a chainpod. While Paprika goes ahead to the storm shelter, Natalina will search the upper crew quarters, see if anything was left behind that might be of use, and ensuring there's no threats that would impede our using it.

Training in perception etc. from Cultured may be useful for either search, training in the datasphere of the giant's tomb might be useful for any interfaces (unless this counts as a different, unfamiliar system). Inabilities in numenera may kick in for some thing. Taking it slow and applying Understanding to rolls. Walk through walls might be useful if there's any sealed lockers, strongboxes, etc. in the crew areas.

JamesLeng 2026/01/03(Sat)11:55 No. 1119601 ID: 5f5c2b
File 176744132535.png - (52.69KB , 1000x600 , The Nightcraft decon hall side view.png )

>>1119577
>If the decon hall isn't safe to traverse on foot, that "branch" can wait until we double back for a chainpod.
Not exactly to scale - the incoming lanes have more of an S-curve shape, close to vertical at the midpoint.

>>1119513
>Reiko wanders from room to room, sniffing around for a control panel or obscure access point she can hack into.
>rolled 11, 6, 16
Comms and navigation room seems like a fairly standard CIC https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/controldeck.php#cicfunct apart from, first, design clearly optimized for people about four meters tall (leaving Reiko with the uncomfortable sense of reversion to a small child intruding on a sanctum meant for adults), and second, surreal dream imagery on most of the screens rather than legible data. Fractal black thorns, lurid flowers sprouting from rotten meat, clockwork half-melted yet somehow still functional.
Everything seems suspiciously clean. Spots close to the floor that ought to be access panels are sealed tight, and climbing up higher risks triggering unidentified buttons with your feet.
>After a few minutes, she finds one hiding inside the neural interface throne room. Rather than linking to the interface, she links her implant to the neural translators instead.
Wary of losing herself again by diving straight in, Reiko crawls around into the mass of cables behind the throne, mapping interconnections and speculating on the wider systems they correspond to.
>queries on the ship's status;
It's alive. Those aren't mechanical subsystems, for the most part, but organs.
>how well it has detected the hull breach,
Like a splinter in the soft tissue between teeth.
>where the other hull breaches are,
Lot of bruising but nothing else torn. Only exits besides the way you came in are the vast cargo bay - like the maw of a baleen whale - and emergency drive halo access.
>how much fuel the ship has,
Severely malnourished, outer skin is NOT supposed to be that color. https://pocketss.tumblr.com/784279836855271424/houseplant-type-friend
>if the ship can scan its surroundings for the fuel it needs,
The memory transfer process is two-way, though the ship-mind is not particularly self-aware or lucid - more like a sick dog noticing how your pockets smell like bacon.
>how the ship maintains life support, if it even has life support, etc.
Most of that air-and-organic-food functionality is entangled with the crew quarters. It wants to fly down to Jackson's Launch, rip that entire shell casing / poison-pond out of the ground and transfer it to the cargo hold. There's easily enough room - like adding a bedroll, or moderately large canteen, to a broad framed backpack.
>specialized in raider tactics
Problem is, as Reiko patiently explains to this hundred thousand ton drowsy-manic nightcraft-puppy, the order of operations. If full repairs require the sludge from the pond, and lifting the pond requires the gravity polarizer's maximum exertion, and the gravity polarizer requires full repairs... there's a hole in my bucket, dear liza, a hole. You can't go sprinting hundreds of miles across the desert to steal water and medicine when you're already badly hurt and dehydrated. Start smaller.

>>1119565
>mission priorities:
>1) Secure the hangar for safe habitation
>2) Figure out ship controls
>3) Repair damage to ship and hangar
>4) Fly off and shoot things that are bad?
>rolled 19, 19, 19, 16, 15, 20, 10, 20
While Reiko explains how repairs aren't currenly possible, Cricket is making progress on those same repairs.
>trained in clock un-making
>create various types of poison
Hangar bay door seems to mostly be a big iris - spiral of thin, overlapping, curved segments. Looks cool, but jams easily, and nigh impossible to get a true airtight seal. Paprika cut a notch into it, plus there's pre-existing patches of crud. Mold or something, but it sounds more like a rust-related jam when it tries to move. Maybe just try... filing down the visible burrs, solvents and gentle polishing for rusty spots, antifungal spray on the mold?

"Rust" absorbs the solvent near instantly, spreads out to twice its initial diameter, then fades into a pattern of yellowish veins, without leaving a single loose flake on the polishing rag. "Mold" seemingly rejects the antifungal spray like sweatdrops on a swamp lotus, but gets steadily darker, thicker, and spongier when massaged, until whole patches peel off as strips of black rubber with the consistency of salted fish, crackling and sizzling like frying grease even as they turn cold to the touch. Whatever the heck that stuff actually was, Cricket's efforts apparently worked - hangar bay door can now open and close on command.

Expedition supplies and chainpods are hauled in to the ship... except for that one crate of individually-wrapped tofu snacks which the four of you had eaten about half of on the elevator ride, which has "mysteriously" refilled itself, and is prudently discarded.

>>1119568
>She'll start with the crew quarters, exploring all the way to the storm shelter / cold storage.
Upper crew quarters can be confirmed clear at a glance - all one big brightly-lit open space. Sweeping the lower deck with certainty will take a lot longer, and probably at least three people. There are two sets of stairs leading down, at opposite corners, and it's a literal maze. Walls, floor, and ceiling are a continuous yet non-repeating pattern of diamond-shaped ceramic tiles. Dark green wider ones, pale blue pointier ones, creating the vague visual impression of a forest canopy with sky peeking throuh. Dim light and high humidity... a jungle-themed locker room. Dozens of cubbyholes, varying sizes and positions, including some that you might be able to climb into if you curled up. Set an item inside one, it floods with what looks - and to anyone else, feels - like gravity-defying vantablack molasses, but that goo or forcefield withdraws when you reach your hand in again, allowing the item to be retrieved. A few already have something in them, from before you arrived.
>rolled 12, 2
Unsure what those contents might be.
>After that, she'll look around for EVA equipment since she'll likely be the one performing space walks. Drive halo exterior access seems the most likely starting point?
>rolled 12, 10
Steering a chainpod through the decontamination corridor isn't difficult, but it's a bit of a rollercoaster ride.
>>1119601
Down a pit, hit a flap which causes another flap just ahead to pivot out of the way, back up and across the other pit for folks coming from the opposite direction. Seems like it was designed to block direct line-of-sight while simultaneously preventing head-on collisions.

Then that narrow pinball tunnel abruptly opens up into the cargo bay, with only a thin steel tightrope underneath - chainpod mainly clinging to a groove in the ceiling. As spacious as those crew quarters seemed, they're like a tiny tongue on to the roof of a mouth that could swallow ten-story buildings.

Engine room door admits the chainpod as far as its equator, but gives a familar "access denied" honk https://questden.org/kusaba/graveyard/res/1034928.html#1039869 rather than allowing Paprika through. Interior is visible, though, dominated by six tall cylinders filled with swirling mist.

>>1119577
>Natalina will search the upper crew quarters, see if anything was left behind that might be of use,
There's a food dispenser, but all it seems capable of is a sort of... semi-translucent salmon-pink hockey puck. Ugh.
Paprika reports that she's found adequate sanitation facilities on the lower deck, including at least one pleasantly warm shower easily large enough for two people.

Dry puddles on the floor at first seem to be ordinary cloth - when touched by any sapient being, even indirectly through a rigid pole, they drape and flow normally - but then when released, the fabric instantly rigidizes. This rigidity seems to be a function of the room rather than the cloth, since it doesn't work when brought out to the cargo bay, but resumes upon return.
With the right setup that could be an almost ideal privacy curtain, even capable of deflecting thrown rocks, yet collapsing to reveal eavesdroppers who get too close.

Stack of hexagonal metal plates leaning against one of the walls turn out to be tables, and possibly also chairs. Whenever they're within 45 degrees of horizontal, anywhere inside the ship (or at least, in the crew quarters, entry hall, and navigation / comms room, since the plates are slightly too wide to fit through chainpod-only corridors), whichever edge is currently lowest acts like a hinge. Let go of one and it'll lay flat with an audible click, no matter how high off the deck.
>inability at understanding numenera
More complicated behavior when those plates are touching a wall or ceiling, which Nat hasn't quite figured out all the nuances of yet.

>rolled 20
Ceiling itself is initially blank, and almost painfully bright, but moderates and redecorates itself in response to certain gestures. Some of the resulting symbols are relatively persistent, but others rapidly decay, or modify adjacent symbols. https://thecodelesscode.com/case/184

rolled 9, 8, 17, 6, 15, 13, 9, 13, 10, 18, 7, 10, 3, 14, 5, 20, 2, 16, 18, 13 = 226

---

>>1119790
Well, dang. Reiko ponders about how, ironically, they could have shaved some time if they brought her doppelganger along for the ride. But they don't have 'Wonder Twin Powers Activate' to swap pla...
A wacky idea begins to form in Reiko's head. Those blueprints for a Transdimensional Body artifact. The one that lets her shift herself or others with alternate universe types, sisters with minute differences that could make or break a mission. What if, in one of her timelines, she nearly overdosed on antifreeze while getting acquainted with her doppelganger but survived, or simply took some antifreeze as a curiousity? And what if, in that universe, she has a glut of antifreeze but her ship-puppy needs a resource that Reiko currently has? Could they trade resources? Would it even work?

Reiko ponders a little more. How much antifreeze does the puppy need to get the automated repair systems running? Reiko can't remember if they packed some antifreeze to tinker with. She'll double check their current supplies. Maybe something else can act as a less-efficient replacement fluid, at least until they can get the real stuff...

[Scavenge (Primary: Something to replenish the fluid systems, Secondary: Mimics) Storage Areas, 2 Effort]

>Tofu snacks infested with mimics
"Aw. I wanted to finish those. Can we at least-"
*sound of crate thrown out the deck*
"-grind them up into gel okay fine."

rolled 20, 4, 4, 14, 15, 19, 19, 7, 10, 20, 11, 3, 8, 4, 3, 11, 16, 16, 6, 9 = 219

---

>It's alive.
"Does she have a name? ...is it a she? I believe ships usually are, but I suppose human convention might not apply here."

>Paprika reports that she's found adequate sanitation facilities on the lower deck, including at least one pleasantly warm shower easily large enough for two people.
Certainly welcome news, and something to look forwards to, after days in the elevator.

> when touched by any sapient being, even indirectly through a rigid pole, they drape and flow normally - but then when released, the fabric instantly rigidizes.
>With the right setup that could be an almost ideal privacy curtain, even capable of deflecting thrown rocks, yet collapsing to reveal eavesdroppers who get too close.
Might allow for some creative artistic displays, as well. Out of curiosity, if Natalina attempts to phase through the fabric, does it detect that as touch?

>ceiling
Ooh! Is... it a language? (I have no idea if the arkus Babel power is meant to be applicable to programing languages, much less a Turing-complete cellular automata, but it could be interesting to attempt!)

rolled 2, 6 = 8

---

>>1119841
>is it a language?
>Babel power
>rolled 20
A tiny subset of the possible symbols have effects on the life support settings - Nat manages to assemble a looping floral pattern which yields both pleasant background music and a localized warm, dry breeze. Somewhat larger subset of possible symbols can be used to reprogram the food printer...
>inability at crafting, salvaging, and understanding numenera
...but prior experience with the innkeeper-abbot revealed that random organic chemicals are likelier to be deadly than delicious, and you've still got plenty of stored food, so experimentation there can afford to wait on more thorough research.

>if Natalina attempts to phase through the fabric, does it detect that as touch?
>rolled 4, 4, 14
Felt like just a few minutes, at most, and an exhilarating rush - skydiving or ski-jumping or sprinting for the sheer joy of it, rather than the usual slog of phasing through thick walls - but everybody else agrees Natalina was gone for at least two hours, and there's a snail-trail of nearly microscopic Bayeux-tapestry-style embroidery from the entry point to the edge where she escaped, correlating with things she remembers reminiscing about. Take 4 intellect damage.

Paprika's conundary contact can weave more of that fabric out of the translucent-pink-edible-hockey-puck material. Seems downright eager to, actually.

>>1119817
>scavenge, 2 effort
>rolled 9, 8, 17
Picking through the conundary's former lair in Zone Ivory - South (on the assumption that Paprika's monster pal will be coming along with you in the ship, so anything left behind is fair game), middle roll fails (yielding 1 unit of parts), but the first succeeds with effort, and the third would have even without. Rolling to see what you've won.

rolled 8, 5, 7, 3, 2, 10, 9, 4 = 48

---

rolling for iotum type, and quantity of shins

>>1119847
7 units of Responsive Synth, 2 cubes of Quantium, 3 plates of Psiranium, 13 shins worth of surgical-grade plumbing fixtures (complete with intact sterile packaging!) that could be used for giving the ship a blood transfusion, and a further 14 units of parts

rolled 12, 18, 5, 4, 9, 2, 10, 4, 4, 4, 5, 3, 2, 19, 13, 12, 11, 1, 8, 3 = 149

---

>>1119790
>A few already have something in them, from before you arrived.
Can I push through the goo hard enough to retrieve the items? I'll apply a level of Might effort.

>Engine room door admits the chainpod as far as its equator, but gives a familar "access denied" honk
Paprika goes scurrying back to Reiko to ask if she can get the ship to provide access to the engine room.

>pleasantly warm shower easily large enough for two people.
Paprika is visibly very excited to show Nat the two-person shower.

>>1119817
>"Aw. I wanted to finish those. Can we at least-"
"Sorry Reiko. I can crack open a crate of something else, if you're hungry?"

>>1119846
>everybody else agrees Natalina was gone for at least two hours
Nat's startled by Paprika immediately pulling her into a tight hug when she emerges. "Sweet Pikachesus, Nat. Warn a girl before you go disappearing like that. Are you ok?" Paprika's been picking up a lot of Reiko's weird vocabulary lately. Seems like she's been waiting right next to the weird fabric the whole time. What did my Nat senses tell me while Nat was gone?

>Paprika's conundary contact can weave more of that fabric out of the translucent-pink-edible-hockey-puck material. Seems downright eager to, actually.
"Huh. Does that...solve your food problem?"

>Paprika's monster pal will be coming along with you in the ship
Of course, unless they don't want to for some reason.

Did I find anything neat in cold storage?

>>1119856
>Can I push through the goo hard enough to retrieve the items?
>rolled 12
Not without breaking part of the wall or figuring out how to hack the biometric lock. It's not actually goo, but rather some sort of stasis field.
>I'll apply a level of Might effort.
>rolled 18
Do you want to break part of the wall? You definitely could.
>access to the engine room
>rolled 5
Reiko explains that right now the engine room is not a good place for people who are made of meat to be breathing unfiltered air, or leaving skin exposed, if they plan on living to see the next week. Something about borated synth fabric and an inner layer of gold foil? Apparently the ship's hearth has been ill-tended, feverish, so its exotic embers need time to cool, and fumes dissipate.

Cherenkov-blue light coming from under water means you shouldn't dive in, but might be fine a few meters away. In open air, very bad news - you may have taken a mortal wound already, before even noticing. But such a light from hard vacuum simply indicates that a tachyon accumulator is working at all.

>What did my Nat senses tell me while Nat was gone?
She was inside the cloth, same as phasing through any other wall.

>Does that...solve your food problem?
"Not directly," the conundary says, while slurping on that embroidered section like a popsicle.

rolled 7, 13, 12, 16, 10, 18, 19, 8, 18, 18, 13, 18, 13, 11, 9, 12, 19, 3, 17, 9 = 263

---

>>1119846
>on the assumption that Paprika's monster pal will be coming along with you in the ship, so anything left behind is fair game
The crew quarters are certainly spacious enough to accommodate another, and a construction assistant would be quite welcome on a ship in need of repairs.

>>1119846
>an exhilarating rush - skydiving or ski-jumping or sprinting for the sheer joy of it
>lost time
>Take 4 intellect damage
>Paprika's conundary contact can weave more of that fabric out of the translucent-pink-edible-hockey-puck material. Seems downright eager to, actually.
Huh. Did she... accidentally discover the extradimensional travel equivalent of a recreational drug? (Possibly only for insect-adjacent extradimensional powers? She only has the conundary and herself for reference). Natalina isn't going to stop their arachnid companion from partaking, but will council caution, in case it experiences similar symptoms.

>>1119856
> Warn a girl before you go disappearing like that. Are you ok?
"I didn't mean to! I was just curious if the cloth would would still sense me and go limp if I was out-of-phase. I hardly expected that[i/]," the arkus replies while returning the hug. "I'm well; I'm sorry to have worried you."

She [i]really needs some way to check which walls are safe to walk though- which are dangerous on the other side, or inside. Something like a specialized redlight chip or hoop staff?

>>1119858
>It's not actually goo, but rather some sort of stasis field.
Not interested in losing more time, Natalina is not going to attempt to wall-hack her way post those.

>>1119790
>Spots close to the floor that ought to be access panels are sealed tight, and climbing up higher risks triggering unidentified buttons with your feet.
"Oh! I found something that could help with that", Natalina says, showing the levitating hexagonal tables/chairs to Reiko. Seems simple enough to set one high-enough in-air to reach the upper panels.

rolled 16, 1, 16, 11, 2, 19, 17, 7, 8, 10, 17, 9, 6, 13, 20, 16, 9, 3, 10, 18 = 228

---

Hanger bay doors working means we can now attempt to seal and clear the rest of the zone. Start by clearing and organizing any junk scattered around the room. Search it, catalog it, and put it in some semblance of a stockpile. That seems like it will primarily be intellect, for searching and organizing, but might or speed may be involved as well? One level of effort for whatever is needed, +1 if it's intellect.

rolled 7, 7, 6, 16, 19, 14, 9, 12, 19, 12, 17, 2, 7, 15, 18, 5, 20, 16, 13, 12 = 246

---

After an hour of writing up inventory, Reiko concludes that there's no quick fix to the ship's motivity systems, but they can start working on helping the ship mentally. Maybe the ship has a solution in their databanks, but is too feverish to remember it.

Reiko spends downtime in the sub-datasphere using her Mechanic and implant to help the ship heal their mind. [Repair Numenera, Effort 3]

>>1119856
"Do we still have those salami burgers?"

rolled 15, 14, 4, 6, 2, 13, 17, 9, 1, 7, 3, 9, 18, 1, 15, 4, 12, 10, 11, 18 = 189

---

>>1119858
>Do you want to break part of the wall? You definitely could.
Hmm, no reason to go breaking all the furnishings already. I'll just make a mental note to ask Cricket to take a look at it when she gets a minute.

>Reiko explains that right now the engine room is not a good place for people who are made of meat to be breathing unfiltered air, or leaving skin exposed, if they plan on living to see the next week.
Paprika listens attentively to Reiko's entire explanation, though she doesn't really understand the blue light thing. "Well thanks for not letting me get myself killed, Reiko! This is all a little over my head."

>"Not directly," the conundary says, while slurping on that embroidered section like a popsicle.
Paprika watches with mild unease until something else catches her attention.

>>1119871
>"I'm well; I'm sorry to have worried you."
"It's alright. I'm just glad you're safe."

>>1119875
>"Do we still have those salami burgers?"
Paprika cracks open the crate in question and sits down with Reiko for a quick meal.

"I didn't realize the ship was alive. And sick too? I feel bad for hurting the poor thing." She shifts, a little self-conscious. "I think it's amazing how much you know about fixing spaceships. Honestly Reiko, I feel kinda useless. Is there anything I can do to help?"

>>1119871
>rolled 7
>Did she... accidentally discover the extradimensional travel equivalent of a recreational drug?
More like the telepathic equivalent of a second degree rug-burn, then a vampire bat licking the carpet clean afterward.

>She really needs some way to check which walls are safe to walk though
>rolled 13

>showing the levitating hexagonal tables/chairs to Reiko. Seems simple enough to set one high-enough in-air to reach the upper panels.
>rolled 12

>>1119875
>After an hour of writing up inventory, Reiko concludes that there's no quick fix to the ship's motivity systems, but they can start working on helping the ship mentally. Maybe the ship has a solution in their databanks, but is too feverish to remember it.
>Reiko spends downtime in the sub-datasphere using her Mechanic and implant to help the ship heal their mind. [Repair Numenera, Effort 3]
>rolled 7, 7, 6, 16, 19

Natalina can phase through any of those sealed panels, benefiting from Reiko's insight into the underlying design to know in advance which ones conceal potentially dangerously energies vs. which could benefit from some quick internal manipulation - or from leveraging previous goodwill with local datasphere-spirits to keep the noise down and let this ship's feverish mind re-focus, at least long enough to crawl out of bed without further tripping over the sheets.

>>1119872
>rolled 16, 1, 16

Cricket Moon finds three cubes of Quantium and five units of parts. Just as she's holding up that third cube into a sunbeam (to check that it's the real thing, rather than mere sparkly blue glass, or whatever the deal is with Paprika's heat-exchanger oddity), she sees a Locutus-class augmech descending the stairs with a huge crate full of wine bottles... and a shoulder-mounted slugthrower it didn't have before, which shoots that iotum right out of her hand.

Sixty seconds earlier, Cricket is careful not to distract her one-minute-younger self while pilfering the partially accumulated salvage, then scampering off to warn the others. So, overall net gain of five units of quantium, ten units of parts, and a brief head start on fleeing from Last Call, Lord of the Supernumerary Chairs.

By the time she's sprinted all the way back to the ship (along with one last case of tofu snacks, which somebody seemingly forgot)...

>1119933
>Is there anything I can do to help?
>rolled 15
...Paprika is sitting in lotus pose next to the door, with a long coiled tube linking the inside of her left elbow to a coolant duct in the disabled gravity-spotlight system. Apparently, to jumpstart the process of healing itself, ship needs something that can most readily be obtained from her blood. Supposedly it'll be a mutually beneficial trade, after everything's settled, but when Reiko warned that there might be itching (and importance of repressing the urge to scratch) she didn't say it'd be inside bone marrow. Or, intermittently, outside her own actual body, invisible stripes woven across the floor.

Wreckage disentangled. Tachyon halo spun up to minimal maneuvering power. The ship is as ready for departure as it's going to be today, or probably this week.

rolled 1, 12, 2, 4, 2, 3, 11, 13, 10, 2, 11, 13, 11, 2, 8, 15, 3, 19, 14, 15 = 171

---

"I believed I was being responsible, you know, leaving the culinary augmech at the bar, where it could be used, rather than appropriating it for good. How kindly restraint is repaid!"

As she offers her facetious complaints, Natalina rolls up her sleeve on one arm and applies the injectable speed boost cypher, followed by a sharp breath as she feels the drug take effect.

"I don't think I can fell that thing on my own, but I can take it's measure and delay it's arrival."

Natalina isn't going to be able to deflect metal slugs with her rapier—so she picks up one of the hexagonal metal plates to use as an off-hand shield. The prior-world chair disputes the usurper-mimic's claim to chair lordship! Assuming the Jack doesn't object, she'll also snag one of those cubes of quantium from Cricket as a fallback.

Phase sprinting to engage Last Call. Trying to see what the range on the slug thrower is; when it takes a shot, two level of Speed Effort, trained in Speed Defense, asset from a shield, and another asset from phase sprint should ease Speed Defense by 5 steps (which should cost zero Speed). Will also attempt to catch it with Scratch Existence as she passes. Unfortunately, that's Might-based so Speed Effort can't help there. The light-weapon attack-easing from her ancestral rapier might, if it's the scratching-implement of choice?

If we get that far in a single post, Natalina's plan is to switch to drawing attacks to cover allies once Last Call closes enough to fire on them.

rolled 16, 13, 13, 13, 18, 2, 4, 2, 10, 8, 10, 12, 7, 15, 2, 3, 20, 7, 11, 7 = 193

---

This is really bad. The last time Reiko had to deal with a homicidal gorilla-sized android chef, she was working with fourteen of Youngmason's seasoned glaives and they still took major casualties.
Whichever Arch-Nano cursed all culinary machines on the planet to have a small chance of going rampant at the mere mention of 'Crème Brulee' needs to be thrown into the sun.

"Aw damnit, not again! Need backup need backup need backup-"

Reiko rushes back to the neural interface throne, plugs herself back into her personal port, and speedruns a quick skim of the ship's abilities, looking for anything functional in its capabilities that could be used as a weapon or distraction.

[Intelligence - Max Effort]

rolled 11, 20, 10, 9, 20, 11, 17, 11, 6, 13, 12, 11, 5, 18, 11, 16, 17, 17, 5, 19 = 259

---

>>1119992
Let the rain fall.
Okay, got a lot of actions, and I'm not sure how many I can do before the mimic-bot shows up. First thing is to activate Kingfisher Shroud. 11/16 Int. Then, I need to put down Rising Riptide at the entrance it's coming through. Then, prep another debilitating poison. If it's a mimitan construct, that should disrupt it's cohesion. One on my wrist blades for if it gets close, one on my dart thrower. Then, hide near the entrance- her shroud should help her avoid injury and help deal with mimitans who get close. After her screw up with the mining laser, she's looking forward to this as an opportunity to prove her worth and regain any respect she may have lost. After that, if there's time left we need to strategize with Natalina. Want to prepare more area denial with Rising Riptide but avoid hindering Nat. Further, if she can land a hit and poison the big guy, they should be able to make short work of the small fry- is there some way for Nat to help her get an alpha strike off? I'd be happy to spend effort but I wanna stack as many bonuses as I can, so if Nat can distract it and Cricket Moon goes for a sneak attack, or if flanking provides a benefit, or anything like that, I wanna set up for a not-quite fastball special with her.

Awarding one extra xp to Reiko for her help getting the ship up and running.

Round 1
>>1120087
Natalina intercepts Last Call at the entrance to the docking tube, 150 meters from the ship.
>rolled 1, 12
>intrusion rejected, reroll
No time to build an adequate shield! Gotta work with what's already here. Nat lifts the (likely contaminated) tofu-snack box out of Cricket Moon's arms with her off hand, lobs it overhand, aiming to jam the augmech's forward sensor array in the manner of a slapstick pie while sliding between its legs, then grab the lid which broke off from Reiko's paint-mixer as it shook itself apart. Sturdy, buckler-sized, handle in about the right place, known with certainty to be indigestible to mimics.

This works out almost, but not quite, exactly according to plan. Rather than being directly blinded, Last Call slightly lifts the crate of wine bottles to parry. Tofu telefrag sends fermented fruit juice spiced with shards of wood and glass spraying everywhere except directly behind it, where Nat is.

>>1120286
>kingfisher shroud
>rising riptide
>rolled 11
In the moment of the explosion, something suddenly becomes clear that's been itching at the back of Cricket's mind since they dropped out of the elevator: it's far too quiet up here, and too dry. Fragments tear her exposed skin, dark vinegar soaks her clothing and hair, but rather than pain or disorientation it feels like coming home. Projectile from Last Call's shoulder-cannon clips her collarbone - the exact spot corresponding to that mounting point, as if acknowledging a peer. (Eight damage, reduced to six by armor. A 12 would have been enough to dodge.) With an act of will she picks up most of the spilled liquid that she's not already wearing, lifting it through the floor grating as if running the burst backward, gathers it into a ball to engulf and hinder Last Call's head and limbs.

Rounds 2 and 3
>>1120087
>Will also attempt to catch it with Scratch Existence as she passes. Unfortunately, that's Might-based so Speed Effort can't help there. The light-weapon attack-easing from her ancestral rapier might, if it's the scratching-implement of choice?
>rolled 2, 4, 2, 3

Oldest book in the family library, memory-crystal transcript of an incomprehensibly ancient original:
>The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you must parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. Is it essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able to actually cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him. You must thoroughly research this.
> —Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings, The Water Book
Certainly thought she'd thoroughly researched that. Turns out if you think only of tragically spilled ancient vintages, and second-guessing every step you take to avoid stumbling through soft windows into hard vacuum, that ALSO means you will not be able to actually cut him.
Good news is, Nat did manage to draw Last Call's attention - even while Cricket's having a full-blown floating-amid-swirling-sparkles magical-girl transformation sequence (over there at the '120 meters from the ship' mark) - and that paint-mixer lid works great as a shield. A slug that otherwise would have hit bounced right off, and it's light enough to maneuver easily, yet hefty enough deflect what would have been a bone-jarring (or -shattering) kick after she returns to melee range.

>Trying to see what the range on the slug thrower is
It didn't try to shoot Cricket until closing to within about 30 meters, even though it had a clear line of fire, and started pivoting at the waist to engage Nat right about the same moment she got that close from behind (after equipping the shield). Low-velocity projectiles might need a relatively high arc that would've intersected the ceiling? Or it might have trouble tracking fast-moving folks further away than that.

>>1120286
>debilitating poison
>dart thrower
>rolled 20
Crushing it with hydrostatic pressure isn't working. No head-holes to drown or force-feed. A pair of mimetic horrors are trying to bloom from the wound on Cricket's shoulder - she absently crushes and twists them into a cloak of snow-white feathers, then stanches the bleeding. Aha, of course! If the armor's too solid, what you need is a drill. Shards of glass and frozen flash-distilled alcohol form up in a spiral around the humble dart launcher, the churning wine-dark sea around Last Call's upper body opens a narrow channel, liquid tendrils briefly link up as a hundred foot long single-use linear accelerator, ramming the dart through a weak spot on the pseudo-augmech's hip joint, then flooding the breach with nerve-disrupting chemistry.

The most potent poisons Cricket can formulate on the fly are only level 5, while Last Call is level 6. Imitation barbot remains sober.

As for physical injury... base 2 for a light weapon, +4 for major effect from the natural 20, +9 for maximum Effort on a single-target attack (which is free, also thanks to the 20) adds up to 15 damage, reduced to 11 by armor. Last Call stumbles, falls to one knee, grasping at the gaping hole where part of its pelvis used to be. One more hit like that, it'll be down for sure!

On its own turn that same round, Last Call lobs a slug at Natalina, which she parries (partly thanks to hindrance from Rising Riptide), and mimetic gel - along with some pink glassy stuff, halfway between cotton candy and fungal mycelia - pushes back into the wound, beginning to close it up, healing 2 damage.
Maybe... two more hits like that?
>rolled 11
Cricket's next dart plinks off of Last Call's armor ineffectively. It swings a leg out to kick at Nat while regaining its footing, and healing another 2 damage.

Looks like in round 4, it's going to spend its action tearing free of the Rising Riptide, then resume advancing toward the ship.

rolled 20, 9, 11, 14, 11, 20, 13, 3, 16, 10, 20, 13, 12, 18, 2, 2, 2, 8, 10, 5 = 219

---

>>1120308
Okay new plan, she gave it her best shot, and it didn't cut it.

Current pools are 7/13 Might, 17/17 Speed, 11/16 Int. Putting down Rising Riptide and using Fleet of Foot will hopefully allow Cricket Moon to outpace their assailant and make a fighting retreat. One speed effort on defense per attack, don't wanna burn my whole pool but should probably put at least a little effort into staying safe since she can't take two more of those hits.

"I don't think I can pull that trick off again, and my poison isn't slowing it down at all. We need to get back to the ship and group up or get out!"

Round 4
Last Call breaks free of the Rising Riptide, advances to 147 meters from the ship, heals 2 more damage.
Cricket Moon applies a new Rising Riptide, then retreats to 105 meters.
Natalina studies Last Call, setting up to apply Understanding next round.

Round 5
Natalina uses Scratch Existence, applying Might effort for more damage x1, more targets x2.
>rolled 11, 13, 10
Hits all three times, for 4 damage each, ignoring armor. Last Call's health is reduced to 5/22, but you're not sure it'll actually stay down at zero.
Nat continues past Last Call to 120 meters.
Last Call heals 2 more damage (7/22), and shoots at Cricket, who...
>rolled 20
...catches the projectile intact. Contaminated Slug Sample x1 can be immediately broken up for ten more darts, or brought back to a proper lab to formulate poison that'll be effective against Last Call, or salvaged for a random cypher up to level 6.
Cricket creates a third Rising Riptide at the 135 meter mark, retreats to 90 meters.

Round 6
Last Call breaks free of the second Rising Riptide, advances to 142 meters, heals 2 more damage (9/22)
Nat briefly meets up with Cricket at the 90 meter mark
Cricket retreats to 60 meters

Round 7
Last Call advances to 135 meters, gets caught in the third Rising Riptide, heals 2 more damage (11/22), spawns a slower-moving minion
Nat retreats to 60 meters
Cricket meets up with Paprika at the 30 meter mark

Looks like you've got at least five more rounds before it catches up, but it'll be back to full health by then.

rolled 17, 5, 11, 11, 5, 13, 10, 15, 8, 10, 17, 19, 5, 10, 17, 13, 10, 4, 1, 5 = 206

---

Paprika's been on her knees, teeth clenched, watching the fight in absolute agony. Fire seems to engulf the docking tube and all of Zone Ivory beyond and she can do nothing but watch another catastrophe unfold, taking two more people she cares about away from her forever.

>>1120398
>Cricket meets up with Paprika at the 30 meter mark
Paprika speaks in a low drawl, dropping her usual bubbly demeanor. "Girl, you tore that beast apart. You're really something special. Now help me pull this thing out of my arm."

>Looks like you've got at least five more rounds before it catches up, but it'll be back to full health by then.
Paprika will sever the transfusion, however she can.

>you're more than just a glaive.
Then she'll burst into flames. Revenge was never the point, though not a single day's gone by that she hasn't dreamed about it. The ninth world is full of monsters, and she needs to be ready to face them.

Change of plans! Sticking with flame blade. Gonna hack this thing into molten chunks. Fleet of Foot to close the distance, one speed effort on dodge actions. One might effort on attacks and three on damage. That should work out to 17 damage per hit, before armor. Here's the math:

8 (windslice spear) + 1 (combat prowess) + 2 (flame blade) + 6 (3 levels of effort) = 17!

rolled 5, 3, 9, 1, 7, 1, 11, 15, 7, 5, 4, 12, 18, 8, 17, 11, 8, 10, 10, 2 = 164

---

Reiko's review of the ship's offensive capabilities: it's a crate of lemons... that can talk. The comms systems are still functional. Every other weapon has some flaw or damage that can't be fixed in a few turns.
Would have been better if she'd just fought on the ground, but there's no time to regret her choices! Reiko uses the ship's network and hacks into Last Call to jam everything she can find with recursive code!

[Disable Machine, 3 Effort, Repeat until Last Call is dead]

>Paprika will sever the transfusion, however she can.
Before Paprika can, her girlfriend's gloved hand blurs into place on her arm, heedless of the fire. "Please. It's not worth hurting yourself."

>>1120400
>rolled 17
>inability at understanding numenera
>+1 to rolls when fighting alongside Cricket
>support from Natalina
That pink fuzzy stuff in Last Call's almost-fully-healed wound... you've seen it before, or heard of it at least.
>>1064824
>Actual structure is two layers of armor-grade ironwood sandwiching a layer of fluffy pink stuff - looks like cotton candy, tastes like itchy razor wire, completely inorganic but grows when exposed to fire, similar to (but even faster than) the way mushrooms grow when it rains.

hm... link formatting trouble. Should be https://questden.org/kusaba/graveyard/res/1064679.html#1064824

>>1120410
>Before Paprika can, her girlfriend's gloved hand blurs into place on her arm, heedless of the fire. "Please. It's not worth hurting yourself."
All of Paprika's fire, which had even started creeping up the handle of her spear, winks out in an instant. She's crying.

"Nat I'm sorry! Did I burn you? I'm so sorry...I don't know what to do! Should we run?"

>>1120411
>That pink fuzzy stuff in Last Call's almost-fully-healed wound... you've seen it before, or heard of it at least.
Paprika starts pointing at the approaching mimicbot and rambling on about meeting a slug who asked her to set a house on fire. Seems like her fury has fully reversed into panic.

rolled 5, 7, 3, 1, 20, 4, 7, 17, 15, 3, 16, 17, 17, 3, 17, 2, 18, 10, 16, 1 = 199

---

>>1120413
>I'm so sorry...I don't know what to do! Should we run?"
"I believe in you."

>Did I burn you?
Ah. That would have been hypocritical of her, wouldn't it? Thank goodness for fireproofed armoring cloth.

>what do
Going to take a recovery roll and proc Understanding while we let Last Call close to within Paprika's tether. When Paprika goes on the offense, Natalina's going to follow with Phase Sprint, and focus on drawing attacks.

rolled 6 + 3 = 9

---

Recovery roll.

rolled 12, 19, 10, 20, 10, 5, 11, 9, 10, 18, 7, 18, 9, 4, 10, 7, 15, 1, 11, 3 = 209

---

>"I believe in you."
Paprika's suddenly all steel and confidence again. She retreats back to the ship with Nat and Cricket, ready to lure Last Call into melee range.

Change of change of plans! For the sake of record keeping, after some discussion and in response to Nat's intervention, I'm going with Nanotech Defense after all.

Gonna cut this thing into room temperature chunks. No flame shroud, but effort applied in all the same places.

rolled 13, 20, 9, 20, 6, 6, 6, 15, 11, 5, 3, 9, 5, 18, 6, 1, 10, 2, 5, 14 = 184

---

>>1120424
Not sure if there's an "aid" roll? Cricket just wants to help back up Paprika and Natalina. At the very least, Paprika can gain a +1 from working with her.

rolled 17, 11, 19, 19, 10, 14, 2, 15, 12, 9, 14, 7, 12, 10, 14, 13, 17, 6, 11, 16 = 248

---

After a few rounds of trying to get something deadly on this ship working, Reiko taps into comms and blares things out.

"Bad news! I couldn't get the weapons systems online! Do you need me to come tank, or should I keep the engines warm?"

Just then, Reiko notices the pink goop. Roll to recall how to subvert it and relay sabotage orders that the girls can conduct. [Disable Device, 2 Effort]

The three of you stride forward as one, steady and confident.
>>1120417
Natalina raises her sword in a duelist's salute, leans slightly left to dodge a projectile, reverses her grip as if to re-sheathe the blade, then advances two more quick steps. Last Call swings at her with a lanky pseudo-mechanical arm, almost long enough to drag on the ground. Just before the impact, blip, she's suddenly behind it, facing away and upside-down, reverse-gripped blade plunging into the spot where a power core ought to be.
Last Call's overextended swing reaches through that same transient portal, grazing Nat's knee on the way to a more solid impact with the back of its own head.
>>1120424
Paprika clamps down on the sharp, isolating fire that's been her constant companion, drawing on contentment and connection with such deliberate, desperate force that it's like cranking back a heavy crossbow inside her own heart. Nearby lights on the metal mesh walkway flicker, and a tracery of frost forms on the thin clear-synth tube that borders the airless void outside. Just as Last Call's eyes dilate, adapting to low-light conditions while sweeping side to side (having lost track of Nat - as everyone but Paprika sometimes will), her restrained blaze is released in a brief, blinding flash. Before those optical shutters can close again, they're jammed by a spearpoint, hammered home thanks to Last Call's fist impacting the back of its own head.
>>1120516
Cricket Moon's battle-choreography isn't as polished, since she hasn't been together with the group as long, but her dark water and shining feathers smoothly fill the gaps between Paprika's flames, keeping Last Call's pratfalls synchronized with the plan, preventing it from regaining its balance. Once it's down, and Natalina has begun the work of methodically hacking it into smaller pieces while Paprika's perfume anti-cauterizes the open wounds, Cricket guards the approach, keeping mimic-slugs from merging with Last Call's remains to revive it, or worse yet, sneaking past to infest the ship.

At last, it's done. The lumpy, mangled heap of contaminated self-replicating materials has stopped trying to reform. A gleaming emerald roughly the size and shape of a mango floats to the top, debris refusing to cling to it, flawless apart from a thumb-switch which you think will trigger some sort of intense but repeatable psychic data-dump.

Nat's battered and exhausted - fighting toe-to-toe with a monster whose legs are each the size of your entire body is a hard workout, even when you win - but probably nothing that can't be fixed with a good night's sleep, a few meals, and a long hot bath.

>>1120522
Paprika's fireproofing artifact, however, seems to have some more serious problem. Rather than the familiar soft chirp and misty spray, it just produces an angry honk. Reiko looks it over, runs some tests, figures that catalytic reagents inside it were overstrained, forced to process too many doses too quickly over the course of suppressing Last Call's pyro-orogeny. Fortunately that'll be quite easy to repair... once the ship's molecular loom is restarted. Which needs to be done anyway! Ongoing blood transfusion has already been a great help on that front, pushed back globulin polymerization enough to spin up secondary and tertiary diagnostic encabulators, which revealed... well, the short, non-technical version is the ship is very hungry / thirsty, and that pond you encountered earlier - though toxic to humans - looks to be exactly the right sort of soup to nourish it. Land on top of that, slurp, problem solved. Probably.

Life support seems to be working fine, and the easiest low-energy orbit would have you grazing the upper atmosphere in about fifteen hours, which is quick enough (and interior is spacious enough) air wouldn't go noticeably stale even if the ship had no life support at all. Could dive faster, if you want to risk warming up the main engines, or delay if you'd rather rest and explore the ship's interior a bit more before bracing for re-entry.

rolled 5, 16, 20, 15, 20, 15, 2, 18, 11, 7, 1, 8, 14, 8, 9, 19, 12, 5, 2, 6 = 213

---

Reiko orders the ship to start up, but while the four are having a conference, she votes on a delayed re-entry. Everyone needs to triple-check the hull for any hint of a structural failure; one microscopic flaw, and entire modules will be set ablaze. Maybe even the core...

Reiko spends a few hours speaking with the ship, using stored multi-error-correction codes to fine-toothed comb the programming for software bugs generated by para-static. Once she's finally certain the self-diagnostics are stable, she runs the program once, then sets it to auto-scan until entry while she looks at anything on the ship with a stat out of place, even if it's a hundredth outside of the margin of error.

[I dunno what to roll so just apply maximum effort until her intelligence pool is reduced to half)

rolled 6, 16, 13, 7, 7, 17, 1, 17, 20, 7, 15, 7, 17, 4, 10, 17, 12, 15, 7, 13 = 228

---

Paprika kneels at Nat's side, carefully cradles Nat's head, runs her fingers through Nat's hair. "Babe, that was spectacular." Paprika stays with her girlfriend until the transfusion is done and Reiko has removed the tube from her arm. Then she gently lifts Nat, bridal style, and carries her to the ship's showers.

Performing a healing task, which mostly involves soothing Nat's bruises and scratches with her first aid kit, and tenderly cleaning all the mimic slime out of Nat's hair and off her body. Healing two points from each depleted pool - difficulty 4 task. Spending two levels of intellect effort and using the first aid kit in Natalina's inventory to ease the task to difficulty 1. Here's the math for my pool expenditure:

5 (two levels of effort) - 2 (edge) = 3 intellect points spent

After a long shower...

>>1125488
>while the four are having a conference, she votes on a delayed re-entry
"You're the expert, Reiko. And I think we could use a little time to recover from that fight."

>>11254841
Natalina falls to her knees in exhaustion and relief, not even able to muster the effort to begin wiping off her coating of spattered slug-slime. Ooh. That speed stim combined with being too tired to move is... tingly.

>>1125507
>Paprika kneels at Nat's side, carefully cradles Nat's head, runs her fingers through Nat's hair. "Babe, that was spectacular."
Natalina leans into the embrace, and gives Paprika a slow, slightly loopy smile. "You were beautiful, yourself. Landing an almost literal bullseye with effortless grace. You found yourself again."
>Paprika stays with her girlfriend until the transfusion
Resting sounds very good at the moment.

>Paprika is visibly very excited to show Nat the two-person shower.
>Then she gently lifts Nat, bridal style, and carries her to the ship's showers.
Being carried off for post-combat aftercare and shower time with her girlfriend sound too nice for Natalina to even feel embarrassed out.
>After a long shower...
Rolling 2d6 + 6 for Natalina's 10 minute and 1 hour recovery rolls.

>>11254841
>A gleaming emerald roughly the size and shape of a mango floats to the top, debris refusing to cling to it, flawless apart from a thumb-switch which you think will trigger some sort of intense but repeatable psychic data-dump.
"...not it. I know I've developed a track record for talks-with-machines, but I have no desire to chance a mental encounter right now."

>>1125488
>Reiko votes on a delayed re-entry
Seems reasonable. If nothing else, there are salvage sites we passed by to get to the ship. We could harvest some or all of those before heading back to down. (Well, less "we" and more "people other Natalina", as she's going to resting for a bit).

rolled 4, 4 + 6 = 14

---

>>1125515

>>1125507
>rolled 6
Paprika brings one of the translucent pink hockey-puck things into the shower (along with a small basket of other stuff) having mistaken it for a bar of soap. Under the warm spray, it puffs up like biscuit dough being baked, and without thinking Natalina takes a bite.
It's not the most delicious thing she's ever tasted - that would be two and a half years ago, medium-rare steak in white sauce paired with a '63 Rokeg pear brandy, paid for by a weasel-ish man trying to distract her from his syndicate's inferior tool-and-die work - but that shiver up her spine says it's easily hit top ten. Still sorta bland and chalky, but apparently something in there is exactly what Nat's body needs at the moment.

Mechanically speaking, five points restored by Paprika's medical care.

>>1125488
Sensor tusks are working, now. Passive scan yields a superb map of the night sky, and two-meter pixels across the earth's surface, while even at minimal power, active scans pick out sub-millimeter detail, along with esoteric resonances which can be interpreted as clues about molecular structure, from literal miles away. Even through some types of walls! Starting to dial up scan intensity further triggered an "are you sure?" prompt, warning how that type of 'missile lock' may be interpreted as a hostile act by twitchy military types - including, at full power, at least an order of magnitude further away than the Moon.
>rolled 5
Due to impatient idle tapping on an initially unresponsive button, the queued results of a dozen nested "zoom and enhance" commands have taught Reiko far more than she ever really wanted to learn about the inside of her own nose.
>rolled 16, 20, 15, 20
The ship's condition is... still far from ideal, but basically stable. Patched seals on the hangar bay door will burn through during re-entry, no question, but they'll retain air until then, proper aerodynamic orientation should be able to keep dangerous amounts of plasma from leaking in, Cricket or Paprika could provide a backup, and even if they fail, vital systems are rated to survive hangar bay interior being on fire for several more minutes than it should be physically possible for high-speed atmospheric compression to last. Well, at least, assuming you land in water or deep snow afterward. https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2016-10-08 How hard can that be? Dozens of miles around the intended destination are snowed-in to adequate depth, and even if you 'miss the barn,' rest of the planet is more ocean than not.

Scan For Iotum channeled through those sensors quickly spots some good loot within easy reach: ten units of Smart Tissue among Last Call's pulverized remains, and nine more Azure Steel, six Pliable Metal, 15x level-one Io in the terapede husk. Not to mention more Parts than you could reasonably carry. Signs of other good stuff elsewhere in Zone Ivory, and enough interference from those layers of scrap that you're fairly sure there's still more being overlooked.

Nowhere near enough Responsive Synth to rebuild a terapede's guts, though. Upwards of a hundred units would be necessary.

Maybe Natalina could sell that Scalar Boson Rod to the University of Doors for considerably (approx. 10x) more than fair market value, via some tricky contract language? "Oh, we only need enough Responsive Synth for this one little project... don't worry about courier costs, we'll head right over to Banded Mesa ourselves, make the trade at your outpost there, and the entire device we're trying to fix would easily fit inside the vehicle we'll be riding."

rolled 20, 1, 1, 2, 7, 15, 12, 11, 5, 4, 20, 18, 13, 4, 16, 10, 11, 16, 13, 14 = 213

---

Reiko spends some time querying the ship's logs, trying to find out how the repair crews used to work, and asks the ship to give her a runtime of all footage from its main camera. From her perspective, it starts out blurry, but Reiko talks to the ship to remove and edit frames to give a single continuous animation from a relatively stable standpoint. It's blurry and inaccurate, but the logs mooshed together give a general understanding of how life went before the Eighth blew up, and a few post-apocalypse movies after that.
Down on the ground the passengers and repair crews looked like ants, but Reiko manages to find the occasional large package being de-packaged in the hangar, with large plates then carried over to the ship.

Reiko rallies any teammates who aren't busy and explores the area that most of the crates of plating came from. With luck, she might be able to find a means of reinforcing the doors even further, or at least a repair manual.

A few scans for iotum along the way probably won't hurt. 2 effort each time to minimize the strain on her cyberware.

rolled 10, 20, 8, 16, 4, 4, 5, 8, 5, 1, 19, 7, 12, 9, 9, 2, 8, 13, 12, 6 = 178

---

>>1125515
>Being carried off for post-combat aftercare and shower time with her girlfriend sound too nice for Natalina to even feel embarrassed out.
Cricket Moon definitely isn't writing stories about the heroic encounters they've just gone through, or any steamy aftermaths. That journal is strictly for studying strategy to work better with everyone.

Long slow re-entry, with the goal being to head towards the chemical pool? What do we roll to make it happen? Presumably it's an intellect task, so, spending max effort on that, probably in concert with Reiko. Seems like something we'd really like to avoid getting wrong.

rolled 15, 8, 4, 10, 2, 4, 18, 12, 18, 15, 2, 14, 3, 6, 4, 5, 4, 15, 6, 16 = 181

---

>>1125515
>You found yourself again.
"I couldn't have done it without you, Nat."

>Being carried off for post-combat aftercare and shower time with her girlfriend sound too nice for Natalina to even feel embarrassed out.
Once Nat's fully pampered and tucked in somewhere comfy, and provided with hockey pucks and tastier snacks from the supplies we brought, Paprika gets dressed and reapplies her makeup. "I'm gonna go see if Reiko needs a hand. Take it easy, ok? I'll be back to check on you again soon."

>>1126029
>Reiko rallies any teammates who aren't busy and explores the area that most of the crates of plating came from.
Paprika will mostly act as an extra set of hands and eyes for Reiko, though she'd also like to do a little more exploring if Reiko and Cricket are up for it. Sweeping the crew quarters (lower maze) seems like a good idea:

>>1119790
>Sweeping the lower deck with certainty will take a lot longer, and probably at least three people.

I'm guessing I never found my way to cold storage?

rolled 20, 5, 11, 17, 13, 15, 9, 2, 14, 1, 17, 17, 9, 16, 10, 13, 10, 11, 16, 13 = 239

---

After a lengthy and relaxing couple's shower, Natalina swaps her brilliance cloth outfit over to a comfortable set of pajamas and fluffy bathrobe.

>A gleaming emerald roughly the size and shape of a mango floats to the top, debris refusing to cling to it, flawless apart from a thumb-switch which you think will trigger some sort of intense but repeatable psychic data-dump.
>Scan For Iotum channeled through those sensors quickly spots some good loot within easy reach: ten units of Smart Tissue among Last Call's pulverized remains
"Would someone like to help me claim our hard-won spoils, before we rest for the night or head back down?"

Headed back out to salvage Last Call's remains (applying Learned for temporary training and Understanding for an asset), with whoever's around and willing to accompany her (she's hardly going to disembark alone after all that). Reiko or Cricket would probably be the most useful, if someone else is going to make a second salvaging attempt to exhaust it.

>>1126151
>salvage Last Call's remains
>rolled 20
In addition to the described Smart Tissue, and level 5 Nachant Key artifact, Nat finds two units of Mother Marrow, and forensic traces implying that Last Call may have been created deliberately by that vector-algebra squidbot as part of discouraging or misdirecting pursuit.

>>1126117
>I'm guessing I never found my way to cold storage?
>rolled 15
In the center of the lower-deck labyrinth there's a roughly cylindrical block with notably thicker floor and ceiling, clear passages all around but only one entrance: a heavy vault door of reddish-orange metal that almost seems to glow in the dark. Some automated system keeps trying to close the door, but it's been wedged open with an incongruously ordinary hunk of wood, about the length of your forearm - irregularly curved and polished the way you'd expect from driftwood washed up on the beach, but intensely dry to the touch, despite lacking salt or char.
When you pick it up, underside of the hunk of wood turns out to be carved with the name of your lost hometown.

Interior of the cold-storage vault is laid out on a hex grid. Central pillar seems to be control panels, six hexes of open space around it, five short passages (plus the entrance) equally spaced around the perimeter, each leading to a walk-in closet with five alcoves. Each of the 25 alcoves seems to be a stasis coffin designed for a four-meter tall humanoid. None are currently occupied.
Those mummified folks from the elevator could probably be stuffed in here, with better results than just burying them in snow.

>>1126072
>rolled 10, 20
Cricket identifies an elliptical route which will allow initial stage of aerobraking to be followed by a stopover at Branu's Kiss, a 30-mile-wide distant relative of the Eye of the Sea (from back in Thread 1) in sun-synchronous orbit. That's an opportunity to validate water-cooling strategy before fully betting all your lives on it, plus the place looks beautiful and would be fascinating to see close-up.

>>1126029
>rolled 20
Terapede carcass has been transferred to the ship's cargo hold relatively intact - decision of whether to restore it or break it up for scrap can be postponed.
>rolled 1, 1
Proposed intrusions:
a) Scan has tentatively identified a source of Quantum Foam deep inside Zone Black; it's actually the environment suit worn by a neutron star dweller. Only plausible way to win a fight with one of those involves the ship's main gun.
b) Incident report and deep archive inquiries have drawn the attention of an ancient architect's datasphere remnant. If you fire the main gun into the station again, or maybe even nearby, it'll become hostile.

rolled 8, 4, 13, 17, 17, 10, 16, 15, 7, 8, 15, 12, 7, 1, 2, 15, 20, 16, 17, 13 = 233

---

>>>1126181
>forensic traces implying that Last Call may have been created deliberately by that vector-algebra squidbot as part of discouraging or misdirecting pursuit.
When Paprika hears about this, the air around her gets notably hotter and there's an intense gleam in her eye. Contrary to its intentions, everything the squidbot does just seems to make Paprika more ferociously eager to follow it to the end of the universe.

>underside of the hunk of wood turns out to be carved with the name of your lost hometown.
Even after all the time and space brainfuckery Paprika's experienced so far, this was enough to shake her. After a minor freakout, she finds something else to use to wedge the door open and brings the hunk of wood back to show her friends, also bringing up the stasis coffins.

"What do you all make of this? You think it could have something to do with that dimensional husk we ran into outside Jackson's Launch? It feels like a message."

rolled 6, 11, 17, 18, 12, 11, 16, 20, 1, 1, 19, 10, 9, 15, 4, 3, 1, 17, 16, 3 = 210

---

>forensic traces implying that Last Call may have been created deliberately by that vector-algebra squidbot as part of discouraging or misdirecting pursuit.
Natalina sighs. "That's frustrating, but with much trouble the misdirection was, I am glad to have defused and avoid conflict with the cephalodroid around civilians. No permanent harm done, at least."

>level 5 Nachant Key artifact
>you think will trigger some sort of intense but repeatable psychic data-dump
The arkus is inclined to leave that for a later date, when her pools are less depleted.

>underside of the hunk of wood turns out to be carved with the name of [Paprika's] lost hometown.
>"What do you all make of this? You think it could have something to do with that dimensional husk we ran into outside Jackson's Launch? It feels like a message."
"If it is, I don't know what it means. 'We were expecting you'? 'We know where you came from'? ...if you think it's important, you may want to store it somewhere safe, as you cannot currently fireproof it."

Natalina can try to check if it's like the dimensional husk; applying training in dimensional travel and perception to see if that curving and polishing could be indicative of interdimensional travel. (Could also try cross-referencing Natalina's training in history or trying to look Paprika's hometown up in the atlas- but that's unlikely to help. If there was a well-known Beanstalk-climbing hero from thereabouts, they'd know!)

rolled 13, 16, 12, 18, 14, 19, 16, 14, 20, 7, 9, 7, 10, 11, 8, 16, 17, 3, 8, 7 = 245

---

"Uh, girls? I may have, um..." Reiko's ears fold, and she looks to the side as she twiddles her fingers. "provoked the station's cybersecurity."

"Sorry," she squeaks. "Also, something dangerous is in Zone Black. I... don't think we're ready to fight it."

>underside of the hunk of wood turns out to be carved with the name of [Paprika's] lost hometown.
"That can't be good. But we should concentrate on getting out of here. Throw the wood in heavy storage, I'll check if it's a mimic later."

Reiko does a quick survey of the cold storage vault, tries to see if it might be possible for her to disassemble and reassemble it on the ship, or if the design can be reverse-engineered. If it's too fragile she'll leave it be.

>>1126272
>If it's too fragile
More the reverse - it's very thoroughly integrated into the ship. Reinforced structural elements double as passive shielding, subfloor conduits feeding the showers are tapped as redundant heat exchangers. Moving it around would be like trying to surgically relocate somebody's lungs into their feet.

rolled 8, 14, 11, 5, 19, 7, 4, 4, 1, 16, 7, 17, 12, 16, 6, 20, 18, 5, 2, 14 = 206

---

>>1126251
>"I am glad to have defused and avoid conflict with the cephalodroid around civilians. No permanent harm done, at least."
Paprika's grin is showing a few too many teeth as she stares intently at Last Call's remains. She seems a little distant. "Uh huh. Always good to avoid conflict."

>"If it is, I don't know what it means."
"Me neither, Nat. But it can't be a coincidence! Right?"

>>1126272
>"Sorry," she squeaks.
Paprika's all gushy over seeing Reiko act anxious and apologetic. "Reiko, what are you sorry for? It's amazing what you've done with those computers so far. We'd be lost without you. Is this going to interfere with our re-entry plans?"

>"Also, something dangerous is in Zone Black. I... don't think we're ready to fight it."
"Can I go say hi?"

>"Throw the wood in heavy storage, I'll check if it's a mimic later."
Paprika stows the hunk of wood somewhere safe where Reiko can access it.

(from discord)
>could try scrounging for reponsive synth in chainpod-accessible sections of Zone Black
Suddenly restless and a little manic, Paprika borrows a chainpod to check out Zone Black while the others are resting or making ship repairs.

>>1126279
>rolled 8,
Eight miles out along the transit rail, so chainpod air supply still at 97%...
>14, 11,
...you come to a thicker chunk of the station's structure,
>5,
...about 500m in diameter (bigger than the ship, but smaller than Zone Jaune) with four other tensegrity cables splayed out from the far side.
>19
Reiko's initial survey says it's mostly solid - too thick and irregular in composition to clearly resolve the interior, which is really saying something when you're talking about active scanners designed to help mine asteroids - but there's an intact-looking airlock on the side, leading to a hollow pocket with...
>7, 4
...intriguing signs of life and/or a large quantity of responsive synth.

Unfortunately, as soon as you've cycled through the airlock and opened up your chainpod to have a look, it turns out to be the oily mass of nanites known as "strut ooze," which lunges toward the scent of fresh organic matter intending to destructively analyze and collect data for some long-forgotten purpose.

>4, 1, 16
Interior is only about fifteen meters in diameter. Machinery embedded in the back wall seems to be continuously extruding more strut ooze, as well as keeping local air breathable, but could potentially be reprogrammed to secrete usable responsive synth instead. Assuming the ooze doesn't eat your face first.

Fire will probably work. Based on what the innkeeper-abbot told you, strut ooze isn't particularly heat tolerant, it always tries to avoid direct sunlight.

>Cricket identifies an elliptical route which will allow initial stage of aerobraking to be followed by a stopover at Branu's Kiss, a 30-mile-wide distant relative of the Eye of the Sea (from back in Thread 1) in sun-synchronous orbit. That's an opportunity to validate water-cooling strategy before fully betting all your lives on it, plus the place looks beautiful and would be fascinating to see close-up.
"An excellent idea, Cricket."

>>1126272
>"Uh, girls? I may have, um..." Reiko's ears fold, and she looks to the side as she twiddles her fingers. "provoked the station's cybersecurity."
>"Sorry," she squeaks. "Also, something dangerous is in Zone Black. I... don't think we're ready to fight it."
"Well, better to know it's there than to stumble across it unawares? Perhaps it will have relaxed by the time we return."

rolled 10, 2, 3, 1, 17, 5, 12, 16, 15, 18, 5, 11, 11, 11, 4, 16, 5, 4, 2, 15 = 183

---

>>1126369
Flame Shroud up! I'll use Fleet of Foot to move over to the machine and try to figure out a way to turn it off without breaking it. One intellect effort. Math:

3 Intellect points - 2 edge = 1 point spent

rolled 12, 13, 8, 1, 6, 12, 13, 4, 12, 15, 11, 7, 11, 12, 11, 13, 11, 10, 17, 2 = 201

---

Reiko instinctively goes for her arm. She quickly punches in a few commonly-known 'Factory Reset' and 'Sleep Mode' codes and sends the signals out across the zone, hoping that whatever accounts as a controller for this metallic goo will shut down. Best-case scenario, they might even be re-programmable. (Good thing these aren't the shutdown codes for the chainpods... right?)

[Disable Device 2 Effort]

Hiss of equalizing pressure as the chainpod unseals, pseudopod extruding itself in pursuit of an unfamiliar chemical gradient, together yield the momentary instinctive impression of a serpent lunging out of the shadows - but a heartbeat later, shadow and serpent both are revealed to be the same single nanomotile mass.

Paprika sprints across pockmarked nickle-steel walls (gravity here feels like it's barely more than a polite suggestion) curving above the vertical shore of an oily pond, dodging inquisitive tentacles all the way.
>>1126487
>rolled 12, 13, 8

Reiko's voice is in Paprika's mind, claiming to be able to see through her eyes. Burbling zen-garden waterfall - oilfall? - from which more strut ooze is continuously emerging, opposite the airlock, is surrounded for at least three or four meters on all sides by a control panel https://jayeaton.site/Art/RttS/Comics/BugFerretTerminal that looks like it was primarily designed for entertaining hyperactive alien children: smooth corners, oversized gripping surfaces, chunky stylized patterns in oversaturated colors from a palette slightly wrong for the human visual range.

>>1126470
Reiko explains that this isn't a totipotent fabricator, but the type of responsive synth they need in order to repair the terapede has a strict subset of strut ooze capabilities. Already uploaded a revision worm with deliberately flawed blueprints, but direct hardware access is necessary in order to clear ALL the local caches at once, prevent what's informally known as the 'three most terrifying...' https://thecodelesscode.com/case/225
>rolled 10
>inability in crafting numenera, salvaging numenera, and understanding numenera
Paprika is still hung up on how they're even talking. https://www.egscomics.com/comic/2016-03-03 Isn't there too much hard vacuum? She couldn't hear anything at all outside the chainpod on the way here.

Reiko says that's not important right now, Paprika just needs to pull the reset lever. Not that...! Yes, over there, teal-and-orange candycane stripes.
>rolled 2
>trained in all Speed defense tasks
Paprika is pretty good at dodging tentacles, but that expertise has limits when she's sufficiently distracted. Seven damage from the impact, reduced by armor to five.

>rolled 3, 1
>specialized in jumping
Likewise, acrobatics with knee-deep mud, even if it weren't actively pulling her in deeper. Fire slows it down, but doesn't make it let go. Has it covered her face, or is that just billowing oily smoke? Smoke should feel hot, should be stinging her eyes, coughing and choking, but there's only a faint tickle like she can't decide whether she needs to sneeze.

Is that the correct lever, in her hand now? Feels like the right shape, maybe, but Reiko was really insistent about colors, and right now Paprika can't see a damn thing.

Can barely hear Reiko's voice over the hissing. That spot on Paprika's elbow, where she gave blood to the ship, is itching like crazy, spreading out, like something's crawling up and down inside her arm.

Hiss isn't the airlock leaking. It's an argument. Natalina would know what the words [?] mean, but she's miles away. From the tone... "Give it back!" "I saw it first!" "the Boss likes me better!" "Viridian heretic!" That sort of thing. Demons, haggling over a lost soul. Presumably her own.

When somebody gets caught by strut ooze, sinks all the way in, usually there aren't even bones left afterward.

>rolled 17
>remote assist from Reiko
Time continues to pass.

Within Paprika's mind, vision and consciousness stop angrily avoiding each other. Their frantic reunion spawns a pounding headache.

Apparently that was the right lever. Room looks a lot more spacious with all the ooze gone, but smoke's still so thick, air is barely breathable.

Wordless hiss tapers off, coalesces into a glimmer: that oily thing couldn't [destructively analyze / eat] her because the ship called dibs.
Not sure if comforted.

rolled 2 + 5 = 7

---

Reiko takes a moment to catch her breath... did she forget to do that? She'll need a nap when they find a way out of this.

Reiko helps Paprika back into the chainpod and seal the door so they can all take a breath.

>How they're even talking.
"Oh, that was pretty awesome. You got some nanotech splattered around your face, and it started eating you at the microbial level, so I was poking shutdown commands left and right-" Reiko stops, realizing Paprika can't see her AR display. "sorry. Basically, I used my implant to order a few clusters of nanomites on your face to shut down, but then I realized I was somehow sending them direct, complex orders and they followed with precision! Which meant I could order one particular cluster of the goo to stop eating you and vibrate words instead. And the problem was I could only give commands to around three or four clusters at a time, and there were around five hundred thousand that I could see. And I tried to replace the nanomachine printer's schematics with bacteria-sized plushies but that only stopped further reproduction. I needed you to, well, 'attack the mainframe' to get the big machine to brainwash every visible nanomite cluster and then some!"

>Air's filling up with smoke
"Uh-oh."

rolled 8, 18, 5, 11, 9, 5, 1, 17, 15, 17, 3, 11, 16, 5, 20, 13, 8, 9, 12, 11 = 214

---

>>1126223
Cricket mutters, half to herself tracing the wood with a finger

"This whole thing feels like a trap. These "crew quarters" are unlike any barracks I'm familiar with. They seem more like some sort of holding cells. Reinforced floor and ceiling? Single entry? This vessel was for mining? Maybe the crew were not sent willingly? I am familiar with the practice of press-ganging for hard labor. Criminals, dissidents, foreigners... you all were press ganged yourselves, more or less, were you not? Perhaps this is a sort of poem. See how you now, crew of this vessel, have become trapped within its walls, forced to dangerous work, as the occupants before."

>>1126369
>>1126642
After Paprika's restless stunt leaves her at risk of permanently leaving the party, Cricket asks if there's any hold up to leaving? Maybe if we are going to get ominous messages and hounded on all sides by deadly space hazards, they could just... go somewhere else? You go off risking your life, not for honor but because you are stressed, yes? Maybe instead, come back, we can go off seeking adventure elsewhere, rather than run off alone into hostile environments without support? Please?

rolled 15, 9, 2, 12, 3, 13, 8, 4, 3, 12, 1, 1, 7, 5, 2, 19, 8, 19, 7, 5 = 155

---

>>1126756
>These "crew quarters" are unlike any barracks I'm familiar with. They seem more like some sort of holding cells.
"The smart-cloth privacy barriers seem unlike to hold anyone but me, and even then, only when unwisely trying to phase directly through." Natalina tries to reassure Cricket. "If anything, that the emergency medical area is so sturdy suggests compassionate or practical design."

>you all were press ganged yourselves, more or less, were you not?
"I suppose needing to avert planetary extinction is a form of duress. Though I do not believe it one our employeer is responsible for. That employment and repayment is offered at all, and that individual have been able to part from our company, feel like crucial differences."

>What's going on with Paprika
Bumping into Reiko later, the arkus is surprised and upset to discover something came distressing close to eating her girlfriend. Who may now be unable to return on her own, cut off across a long stretch of vaccum, preventing Natalina from running off after her, as her instincts immediately begin to clamor for.

Another chainpod docking in the same location would presumably be contaminated with the same smokey air. Can we rig up some kind of portable air canisters, or does the ship have some handy? An air purifier?

rolled 19, 1, 7, 5, 7, 13, 16, 11, 2, 17, 1, 15, 10, 9, 7, 5, 13, 19, 11, 11 = 199

---

>>1126642
Paprika focuses on the floor beneath her for a while. The rise and fall of her chest as she slows her breathing. "Reiko...thanks."

>Not sure if comforted.
Well, she's alive. If the ship also craves Paprika's supple flesh, she can cross that bridge when she gets to it.

>>1126697
>"Oh, that was pretty awesome. ..."
Paprika blanks out most of Reiko's explanation as she tries to ground herself. Something about plushies? She could use something to snuggle right now. "Uh...any idea why the smoke isn't making me cough? I feel weird."

>Bumping into Reiko later, the arkus is surprised and upset to discover something came distressing close to eating her girlfriend.
Paprika's gathered herself a bit by the time Nat comes into the conversation. "Reiko, can she hear me? Please tell her I'm fine. I don't want her to worry. And hey, now we'll have all the centipede guts we'll ever need!"

Can Paprika make heads or tails of the panel she just interacted with, now that she has a minute? Is the air replenishing, or is she on a time limit?

>>1126776
>Can Paprika make heads or tails of the panel she just interacted with, now that she has a minute? Is the air replenishing, or is she on a time limit?
>rolled 19
>inability at understanding numenera
>one level of intellect effort

Stuff Reiko said before is starting to make more sense. It's like... there's a printing press, but instead of paper, it prints on oil. Reiko sent a... hungry little caterpillar, through the datasphere, which snuck into the printer's office and stole letters out of the storage tray. Everything but the vowels, let's say. Had to pull that lever to break up the page currently being printed, so the burglar-worm could reach those last few consonants.

Now, when it tries to EAT YOU-EAT YOU-EAT YOU the closest it can get is EA O U-EA O U, and "O" is what you need to breathe, while "U-EA" is the stuff needed for rebuilding a terapede's guts.

Air does seem to be getting clearer... very, very slowly. Or at least it's not getting worse.

Maybe there's an air intake that's gotten clogged. You could speed along the cleanup process by swapping that clogged filter for a fresh one.
>rolled 1
...assuming you can find a fresh one. And don't accidentally break the machine by letting a big whiff of unfiltered smoke into its delicate innards.

rolled 6, 4 + 8 = 18

---

>>1126787
Paprika wants to meet this tiny burglar-worm.

>Air does seem to be getting clearer... very, very slowly. Or at least it's not getting worse.
"Reiko, I think I'm good to sit tight. I'm not in any immediate danger, but I may need a ride back. Just be careful, ok? The smoke...well, I feel fine, but it's pretty thick. I think that transfusion did something to me."

>And don't accidentally break the machine by letting a big whiff of unfiltered smoke into its delicate innards.
I won't risk breaking the air-giving machine.

Figure it's safe to say I brought water and snacks on this adventure, so I'm going to take both 10-minute and 1-hour recovery rolls while waiting for pickup.

Paprika sits down, carefully undoes her tight bun and lets her hair fall over her shoulders, down her back, long enough to touch the floor. She lets her mind wander to those couple days she spent in a maid dress, packed in a space elevator with that damn squidbot, and silly fantasies about it bringing her along and coercing her into cleaning its spaceship. "Let it go, girl. Gotta focus on saving the world. Wish I didn't get so hung up on things."

Making two recovery rolls!

rolled 12, 2, 17, 17, 16, 6, 17, 9, 20, 1, 15, 16, 14, 15, 18, 8, 8, 12, 10, 16 = 249

---

"Uh, Nat? We have a problem! And by we, I mean Paprika! She needs oxygen! I'm going to send her a chainpod with oxygen reserves, you and Cricket need to look for - I don't know, oxygen tanks and better maps of the ship, or something!"

Reiko links up to her chainpod and remote-drives it towards Paprika. She concentrates on driving unless the others come up with a better solution.

>>1126869
Reiko does not have a method for steering chainpods by remote control from multiple miles away. "Very long range" for Machine Bond is only about 500 feet, a tenth of a mile, and even within that range they're not well suited to fully remote piloting - lack of navigational sensors, for one.
>rolled 12, 2, 17, 17, 16
>trained in understanding numenera
She does however manage to drive to where Paprika is the old fashioned way, rig up a crude vacuum-driven fog machine out of a water barrel and a teakettle, leave it in the chamber's airlock, then manipulate airlock controls (from outside) into boiling the water, thereby eventually capturing most of the smoke in water droplets. Could end up with mold growing in there before climate control can handle all the excess moisture, but that's a problem for next week.

Air inside the chamber is now breathable unfiltered, and there might even be another chamber beneath that pile of rubble where the strut ooze used to be.

Paprika's been rescued. Keep digging, or depart?

rolled 18, 15, 4, 13, 15, 18, 13, 5, 18, 7, 8, 1, 15, 19, 6, 4, 8, 5, 16, 19 = 227

---

Reiko looks around at the new smog-mud splattered across the room. She walks up to the control panel, and attempts to download copies of the console's database of nanomachine schematics. Maybe she can figure out how to create the responsive synth they need from a different machine, as long as they have the blueprints to tell it what to produce.

Reiko also looks at her Rage Thrower, wondering if she could somehow apply it to the room to act as a further binding agent for the smog-mud.

After contemplation, Reiko tells Paprika that they should leave for now. One remote command could override their hack and print even more goo.

>>1126372
Tumbling through the endless night between Earth and the sun is a bubble of blue-green water about 30 miles (48 km) in diameter called Branu’s Kiss. A riot of green and blue plantlife fills the Kiss, so thick that it’s usually impossible for creatures inside to see more than a long distance (100'/30m) in any direction. Among the junglelike submerged growths of green and yellow, shoals of multicolored fish swarm and dart. With shimmering tails and golden fins, they evade darker, larger predatory shapes streaming translucent, flesh-absorbing shrouds. Thousands of tiny living creatures constantly swim through the Kiss, and as often as not, they tickle the back of an explorer’s neck or legs in their profusion.
A powerful automaton named Branu tends to the Kiss, seeing to the habitat’s welfare and protection like a gardener. Branu nourishes that which enriches the Kiss and eliminates that which it judges to be as useless as a weed. The automaton also protects the Crux, a massive device at the heart of the Kiss. The Crux maintains the environment within the bubble, constantly treating the water to make it breathable and scrubbing it so that toxins don’t build up. The Crux also extrudes new animal and plant species into the Kiss, though much of what the device produces eventually dies off. Still, biodiversity remains much higher than such a small environment would be able to evolve on its own.

On approach, Branu hails your ship and makes an olive-priority request - significantly higher than the ship seems to think is normal for traffic control directions, but a notch below full emergency - that you dock at a specific spot on the surface, before a specific time, which is less than an hour away. Achieving the specified rendezvous will require pushing the ship's maneuvering coils somewhat harder than you'd been planning to: first, accelerating forward when you were initially planning to slow down for a more cautious approach, then dodging through chaotic clouds of debris, then circling two-thirds of the way around to a spot on the opposite side, and finally a high-G "hook" to actually match position and velocity.

Nothing extraordinary if the ship were in good repair, but that first pass of aerobraking shook a lot of little things loose, and more than half the hull's surface is still noticeably hotter than it's supposed to be. Just keeping on top of routine maintenance is meant to be a full-time job for about twice as many people as you've got.

Good news is, the fluid inside Branu's Kiss isn't exactly pure water. Not only aerated to the point that unmodified humans can breathe it, but also significantly more compressible. If you miscalculate and crash, the ship will likely be structurally fine, and innocent people near the impact point might not even be all that badly injured by concussive force.

rolled 12, 10, 11, 15, 19, 11, 13, 20, 14, 17, 14, 8, 5, 6, 9, 4, 6, 10, 14, 2 = 220

---

Reiko sends a message back to Branu, asking if they can send spatial maps and move some debris to make the trip less likely to cause total biosignature failure.

Also:
"Gods, I need to get laid."

rolled 7, 14, 12, 17, 1, 10, 8, 15, 7, 20, 9, 20, 4, 16, 12, 7, 9, 2, 17, 1 = 208

---

>>1127124
>Reiko rescues Paprika
"Thank you, Reiko. Truly and sincerely, thank you."

>>1127218
>"Gods, I need to get laid."
...it would be very rude for gloat, especially to the person who rescued her girlfriend.

"I'm not sure islf the Kiss is inhabited with persons sufficient for a port call (despite the name), but we should hopefully be back in Jackson's Landing in a day? Surely someone there would be interested in a traveling hero."

>>1127200
Today, Natalina is dressed in an overlarge transparent synth raincoat, with with its exaggerated proportions providing an overlapping silhouette. (She's safe from splattered slug-slime today)! Her outfit underneath sports bright blocks of primary colors. Unfortunately, this was before laying eyes on Branu's Kiss.

"Is that habit entirely aquatic? I might need to change, a swimsuit might be more appropriate."

>On approach, Branu hails your ship and makes an olive-priority request - significantly higher than the ship seems to think is normal for traffic control directions, but a notch below full emergency
Could we might a polite request for more context or information? It seems reasonable to let airless-space control know that our bird is injured and we were planning to take things easier.

rolled 1 + 3 = 4

---

New day, 10 hour / sleep recovery roll.

>>1127218
>send spatial maps
None are readily available in compatible format, but approval is granted for full-power active scanning of the entire drift cluster, other than the masscon within 1% of the bubble's exact center.
>move some debris
Do whatever you like to debris outside the membrane, so long as it doesn't result in impacts with the membrane energetic enough to risk causing damage.
>"Gods, I need to get laid."
Branu does not see how that is relevant to the immediate navigational problem, but previously-observed consensus position among approx. 100 human residents involves at least rhetorical willingness to perform various outlandish and unpleasant acts in exchange for safe departure.

>>1127222
>polite request for more context or information?
>rolled 7
Someone who doesn't understand their own need for vacuum-rated protective gear is going to be passing through the membrane at approximately that time and place, whether there's a ship ready to catch them or not.

rolled 5, 8, 7, 3, 7, 9, 2, 8, 7, 6, 5, 7, 6, 8, 7, 8, 1, 8, 8, 2 = 122

---

>>1127229
Can we communicate to the caretaker that our ship is in disrepair, without enough crew, and that making it in time will likely push them beyond what their current crew can handle, potentially resulting in a crash? Saving people from hard vacuum seem worthwhile, but they'd really rather the gardener not prune them as an invasive pest.

>>1127229
>Someone who doesn't understand their own need for vacuum-rated protective gear is going to be passing through the membrane at approximately that time and place, whether there's a ship ready to catch them or not.
Part of Natalina's mind latches onto the implications of that message. A ruler who respects indepdent agency to the point they are unwilling to act to stop someone under their care from making a lethal error, but who nonetheless makes the effort to protect them from the consequences when possible? Or they're simply unable to prevent then from acting.

The larger portion of her focus is on the immediate issue, however. "I don't think we can in good conscience leave someone to die in an airless void simply because it would be safer or easier. I say we make the attempt."

rolled 11, 17, 9, 6, 7, 12, 20, 18, 14, 8, 6, 1, 2, 16, 16, 17, 5, 16, 7, 19 = 227

---

Reiko's dealt with enough trust fund teenage antics to realize why this is so important to a living demigod.
"Paprika, means that we'd better get paid because this is going to wreck our rig. Hoist the sails and fire up the afterburner!" She decides to mute outgoing comms so Branu doesn't hear them swearing and insulting him even more. "Either we do this, or we are as good as banned from this watermoon! I vote yes!"

Reiko quickly gets to work while linked to the ship. Together, they wire up a full scan minus the restricted area, looking for an alternative trajectory that doesn't involve the asteroid field.

"Come on come on, there has to be something! Okay, here's a list of stuff we need done! Pick one and work on it! Tap the list to get instructions!" Reiko has the ship display the list of maintenance tasks needed to reinforce the ship or enhance its evasion.

>>1127344
>full scan minus the restricted area, looking for an alternative trajectory that doesn't involve the asteroid field.
>trained in understanding numenera
>Interface. By directly plugging into a device, you can identify and learn to operate it as though the task were 1 level lower
>rolled 11

To a first approximation, Branu's Kiss is surrounded on all sides by "asteroid field." It's the most massive object in this drift cluster by a significant margin, and on such a stable orbit that the theoretical exact center of whatever gravitational doldrum produces the cluster spends more time inside the membrane than not. However, active scanning reveals a lot of open space between any rocks large enough to cause serious damage, and the ship's mind seems to be up to the task of mapping out expected trajectories. None of the options are perfectly safe...

A) That chunk of nickel-iron is roughly the same size as the ship, and already on a nearly parallel course. Could use the main gun to adjust its vector slightly by ablating part of the metal, then ride in its wake.
Advantages: least strain on maneuvering coils (less than the original planned course, actually! So much ferromagnetic mass to kick off of mostly negates the difficulty of that high-G 'hook' maneuver), chance to gather several tons of cheap but fairly sturdy building material
Disadvantages: strain on the main gun, significant quantities of molten iron in the cargo hold wouldn't be good for overall waste-heat situation (and might be a direct obstacle to sensor tusk interior access), risk of splashes hitting the Branu's Kiss membrane

B) Most direct route passes through a thin belt of... something the mineral database is having trouble IDing. Too many surface volatiles and embedded phosphates for a normal carbonaceous chondrite, not nearly acidic enough for plutonian ice, density suspiciously uniform overall but varying significantly within any given instance. Longest dimension of a given chunk is mostly in the 0.5 to 3 meter range, with a lot of narrow cylinders, and relative velocity is very low by orbital standards, so maybe it'll all just bounce off your nightcraft's outer layer of mechorganic blubber (supposedly equivalent to steel plate a meter thick, in the relevant spots) with minimal damage, but, if that stuff is sturdier than it looks, or contains some sort of Iron Wind spores...

C) Autopilot spits out a convoluted proposal which meets the scheduled deadline exactly.
Advantages: overall odds of collision with anything bigger than a paint chip or grain of sand are as low as mathematically possible, given the constraints
Disadvantages: autopilot seems to be a lot more optimistic than Reiko is about how much strain those maneuvering coils can take - may be assuming original spec, rather than checking current condition. Also, only just barely hits the time window Branu specified, with touchdown forceful enough to be taking full advantage of the membrane's flexibility. Wouldn't leave much slack if any sort of further rescue operation is needed on arrival.

rolled 19, 1, 20, 15, 19, 14, 13, 1, 20, 11, 7, 14, 18, 16, 19, 5, 1, 9, 19, 3 = 244

---

>>1127435
>C
"I distrust the third option; it depends entirely on a single piece of abused numenera performing optimally, and even if we do prove capable of making quick repairs in the even anything goes wrong, there will be no time to do so."

>B [...] something the mineral database is having trouble IDing
"Perhaps the problem is they are an unexpected configuration of materials. Is it possible those are something living? A swarm of void-faring machines or creatures?"

>A [...] iron in the cargo hold wouldn't be good for overall waste-heat situation (and might be a direct obstacle to sensor tusk interior access
"A pile of cargo in the way wouldn't stop my entry. Once it's cooled, at least. Phasing doesn't ward off energy, which heat is. Cricket might be able to provide a fluid heat sink?"

>use the main gun [on a] chunk of nickel-iron
"Paprika's Ray Emitter is likely too powerful, and wouldn't be able to track a moving target."

Natalina's of the opinion that between options A and B, it seems like the group has more tools respond to the possible problems of A. We're much-less well equipped to deal with B if the bogeys are hostile or a contact hazard. Given limited time, picking a course quickly may be more important, than picking optimally, however.

>>1127481
>Perhaps the problem is they are an unexpected configuration of materials. Is it possible those are something living?
>rolled 19, [...] 20
>You’re discerning, trained in all tasks related to perception, detecting differences
A thousand porcelain bowls, painted identically, broken uniquely.
>tasks related to knowledge of current events and history
One every few years since before Uxphon's founding. Further back than credible attestation of continuous human life anywhere in the Steadfast or Beyond.
>Datasphere of the Giant's Tomb
Nudge the object-recognition algorithm away from "minerals," over to "disaster relief," and suddenly it's as easy as a river flowing to the sea. Fractures at different points produce fragments with overlapping sections, identical semi-fractal internal patterns. Painted identically, broken uniquely. Fingerprints, where fingers can be found. Retinal veins, after correcting for distortion due to decompression and freezing. A four-meter tall humanoid - the same type this ship, chainpods, the Tomb, were all presumably built by and for. Broken uniquely, by essentially identical forces.

Once upon a time there was a girl, whose family had fallen from greatness. A machine-mind gave her a quest. "Will you pay me for such labors," she asked, "in some way that benefits my family's good name?"
"I cannot promise to explicitly commemorate your deeds," said the machine, "but a thousand statues, painted identically, would be no trouble at all."
Satisfied with her own cleverness, she marched boldly off the edge of the world.

More, than once, upon a time.
>rolled 1
Natalina is laughing and cannot figure out how to stop.

>Natalina can't stop laughing
"Hey Paprika? Can you do a quickie on Natalina in under a minute?"

rolled 9, 10, 6, 16, 19, 5, 9, 6, 2, 8, 10, 20, 17, 20, 2, 6, 15, 7, 20, 15 = 222

---

>>1127502
>More, than once, upon a time.
>>1126756
>See how you now, crew of this vessel, have become trapped within its walls, forced to dangerous work, as the occupants before.

Cricket isn't directly observing what Natalina is, but, I think she's already come to the same conclusions.

Let's go with plan A and work on our firefighting skills.

rolled 5, 17, 17, 6, 13, 20, 11, 14, 4, 9, 5, 1, 8, 20, 18, 5, 7, 9, 17, 8 = 214

---

Reiko runs through each automated calculation to pick out a 'least-ish bad' firing option, opting for a strategy that causes considerable extra debris but at slow velocities, seeing as the asteroid field is meant to act as a border wall rather than a detriment to trade.

Reiko takes a few moments to breathe, get used to connecting to the weapons systems, and triple-confirm the targeting solution. She fires at the asteroid in their way.

rolled 14, 20, 7, 6, 2, 13, 6, 16, 6, 18, 10, 14, 9, 13, 1, 18, 18, 4, 19, 3 = 217

---

>>1127124
>She does however manage to drive to where Paprika is the old fashioned way, rig up a crude vacuum-driven fog machine out of a water barrel and a teakettle, leave it in the chamber's airlock, then manipulate airlock controls (from outside) into boiling the water, thereby eventually capturing most of the smoke in water droplets.
Paprika sits and enjoys the sounds and smells of Reiko's improvised humidifier while she waits for the air to clear. "Reiko, thank you so much for coming to my rescue. You're wonderful, you know."

>might even be another chamber beneath that pile of rubble where the strut ooze used to be.
>Keep digging, or depart?

Paprika's eager to keep digging, but...

>>1127125
>After contemplation, Reiko tells Paprika that they should leave for now.
"Ok. I guess we can come back later?"

>>1127344
>>1127336
>"I don't think we can in good conscience leave someone to die in an airless void simply because it would be safer or easier. I say we make the attempt."
"I'm with Nat. We have to try at least."

>"Okay, here's a list of stuff we need done! Pick one and work on it! Tap the list to get instructions!"
Little disoriented by all the commotion and talk of routes and trajectories, but Paprika tries to help out however she can.

>>1127502
>Natalina is laughing and cannot figure out how to stop.
"Nat, what's wrong?" Paprika gently holds Nat and tries to calm her down. "Hey, you're okay. I'm here. I don't understand..."

rolled 10, 1, 16, 13, 1, 9, 8, 9, 6, 8, 3, 20, 20, 1, 18, 6, 8, 15, 11, 11 = 194

---

>>1127502
>Natalina is laughing and cannot figure out how to stop.

>>1127692
>"Nat, what's wrong?" Paprika gently holds Nat and tries to calm her down. "Hey, you're okay. I'm here. I don't understand..."
An ever-repeating chain of broken porcelain promises; her own foolish reflection of that tragedy.

Natalina, currently unable to speak effectively, in an attempt to answer Paprika's question, gestures helplessly at the display with the "disaster relief" results, mimes using a needle, and then indicates herself. ("What's wrong? That horror over there, and how it's similar to the deal I struck in the City of Needles").

...hopefully this episode passes, she doesn't want to have to communicate entirely with charades. She'll answer better later. The hysterical laugher at least gets quieter as she presses into Paprika's embrace.

>>1127793
>gestures helplessly at the display with the "disaster relief" results, mimes using a needle, and then indicates herself.
Paprika's gaze follows Nat's fingers to the display, and her eyes light up with comprehension. "Whoa, freaky!"

>>1127686
>triple-confirm the targeting solution
>specialized in raider tactics
>rolled 5, 17, 17
Two of three match exactly, but that first one was way off. Probably a loose wire somewhere in the starboard sensor tusk, shaken loose by mix of vibration and thermal expansion during aerobraking. Greedy packet-routing algorithm (missing its original higher-level supervision) stochastically amplifies the intermittent contact, resulting pattern of semi-persistent nanosecond delays creates a 180-degree phase rotation in the VLF active scan while millimeter-wave lines up almost normally, then a later filtering step's edge recognition rounds off the wrong way, converting it into sporadic depth-of-field errors.

Paprika volunteers to run down there, find and reconnect the loose wire, which should solve that problem or at least stabilize it for the time being. Even before she's done, two exact matches should be good enough for targeting.

>opting for a strategy that causes considerable extra debris
>rolled 6, 13
Plan is an initial minimal-duration, max-intensity pulse, targeting the side of the asteroid which faces away from Branu's Kiss. Ejecta from that should mostly either end up far above the drift cluster's overall escape velocity, or be flaked-off surface layers which end up landing back on the asteroid itself. That initial "kick" simultaneously puts the asteroid on a vector closer to where you need it, serves as a sonar pulse which lets you confirm its internal density, and serves as a calibration test for the main gun's control surfaces, minimizing EM field turbulence during the second burn - which will require considerably more ongoing precision.

>>1127669
>Obstacle Running
>Fleet Of Foot
>Flex Skill: Firefighting
>Initiative
>Intellect Edge 3, so first level of Effort is effectively free
>rolled 9, 10, 6
When the time for that second shot rolls around, nothing inside the main gun's control systems is still on fire...
>Trained in Understanding Numenera
>rolled 16
...or damaged in any really serious way by sudden immersion in water...
>Trained in Clock Un-Making
>rolled 19
...nor even out of position by enough to disrupt overall calibration.

Was a bit of a near thing, though. Three uses of Obstacle Running with only Speed Edge 1 means Cricket's speed pool is down to 11/17.

Damage control across a more-than-70-meter-long machinery space would be a LOT easier if you had a team of at least five or six available to focus on it, and extinguishers that spray some kind of nonconductive foam. Could probably throw sixty people at the problem before they'd start getting in each others' way, assuming they all knew what they were doing.

>>1127686
>but at slow velocities
>rolled 20
Spectral analysis from that first shot shows interior as iron, nickel, and chromium in a roughly 15:3:2 ratio. Should have a notably lower melting point than chrome-free meteoric iron, which is good news for this next step: just before closest approach to the asteroid, a series of rapid pulses timed for cavitation drilling, transitioning to a continuous beam with wattage carefully managed to keep the reciprocal stream of white-hot metal within a narrow range of temperatures. A small portion of that spray is scooped up by the nightcraft's cargo hold, while the (now slightly more nickel-rich) remainder gets re-collimated by magnetohydrodynamic fringe effects of the tachyon halo, and - thanks to the fact those temperatures correspond to exhaust velocities almost exactly twice that of the asteroid's current orbital velocity relative to Branu's Kiss, but pointed in the opposite direction - should end up in something very close to a stable retrograde orbit. Even if all that scrap iron does eventually impact the membrane, it'll be coming in at a very shallow angle, scattered into pea-sized spherical pellets if it isn't still liquid, and in either case distributed over a wide area, thereby hopefully minimizing puncture risk.

Nightcraft and nameless asteroid spend about twenty minutes side-by-side, locked together by esoteric forces in dynamic tension. From outside, it probably looks like you're abseiling down a rope of braided lightning.

Approaching the destination, beam cuts off exactly on time, asteroid starts to glide away even before the maneuvering coils "kick," but, of course, a million tons (maybe closer to 950,000 once you're done with it) of metal doesn't just cool back down instantly. As the Nightcraft rotates gracefully around its long axis, a three-fingered hand flipping from palm-up to palm-down, leftover liquid steel burbles out behind it, splashing across the more heavily armored side of the hull, like the dregs from a tectonic titan's teakettle, or ink dripping from a torn wineskin to outline handprints on a cavern wall. However, in this case that silhouette is wider than the average frontier homestead, farm-fields and all, while a surrounding ferrous puddle spreads all the way to this tiny droplet-world's horizon - though geometrically speaking, that horizon isn't particularly far away now that you've landed.

At the spot Branu indicated, just inside the mebrane, you find a small group of humanoids - one of them, the apparent leader, nearly four meters tall - being encircled by...
>rolled 5
>rolled 11
...well, Reiko and Cricket aren't exactly sure what, but they look a little bit like giant eels made of smoke, and definitely move like pack-hunting predators. Smallest humanoid seems to have recently shot one of the smoke eels with a harpoon gun, which is in the process of reloading. Both sides are startled by your arrival, putting the fight momentarily on hold.

Main obstacle to a rescue at this point is the fact that there's still about thirty meters of hard vacuum between the hangar bay entrance and the membrane's surface.

Membrane logically has to be macro-scale permeable somehow, for people armed with sharp sticks to be routinely walking out through it, so it might be possible to trigger that same effect in reverse (and at a grander scale) to close the gap by letting the ship sink at least partway in. What if something in the water starts chewing on the hull, though?
Probably other options too. Branu's Kiss doesn't seem to have proper docking facilities, but there are a lot of relevant things you could potentially build just with materials already on hand.


>>1127793
>book of family history
>rolled 10, 1, 16
Natalina huddles on Paprika's lap during chainpod ride to the sensor access hatch, soon finds hunting for loose wires a welcome distraction. Just a bunch of widgets, in a weird little conical warehouse. Just gotta find the one that was damaged in transit. Learned to use an abacus before she could walk, this ought to be easy. Nobody ever heroically doomed themselves by working as a third-shift inventory clerk.

Speaking of which, one of those dooms that does sometimes happen to a third-shift inventory clerk is getting accidentally Cask of Amontillado'd by somebody coming in first thing in the morning and carelessly piling stuff in front of the only door. Nothing heroic about that!

Loose wire successfully located. It's at the back end of a crevice just slightly too narrow to crawl into, and roughly twice as deep as a human arm is long. Got some specialized tool for that sort of reach, which you forgot to bring along - left it upstairs with the bulk of the expedition supplies. Giggling and sobbing gradually subsides to a level which shouldn't interfere with routine activity, but Nat's still feeling very psychologically brittle - intellect Effort will cost an extra point per level until her confidence in long-term survival and/or meaningful control over her own destiny is somehow restored.

Hatch leading back to the main cargo hold is stuck shut, and feels warm, as if there were a fire raging on the other side. Heh. It's... it's probably fine. Reiko's saying something over the intercom about maneuvers proceeding on schedule, resultant rain of molten metal in the cargo hold. See? All part of the plan. Heh, heheh. It's fine! Everything's gonna be fine. Just gotta... take a few deep breaths, hug Paprika some more, plug this monitor tap into one of the direct feeds and do a bit of idle stargazing, because that's exactly the sort of thing somebody who was trapped in the basement of a burning warehouse definitely wouldn't be able to do.

As the ship performs a barrel roll, direct feed from that section of the sensor array rotates around to face the jungle-ocean of Branu's Kiss. Oddly, with the current display settings, it still resembles stars. Flickering and shifting around a lot more, though. Almost looks like that could be a form of language, or maybe abacus-work.

rolled 15, 9, 8, 12, 12, 7, 14, 10, 13, 20, 2, 11, 17, 6, 8, 8, 9, 14, 4, 12 = 211

---

Theorize test implement escalate - okay in this case, that last one should be done first.

Reiko calls up Branu again, asks for instructions on how to enter the watermoon safely and warns them that they'll start testing things out if they don't get an answer within one minute. After that one minute passes, Reiko tests out how to permeate the artificial atmosphere without ripping it apart by throwing objects into the membrane at increasingly fast speeds until she gets a general idea of what the membrane does and how she should approach the landing, and then implement her best calculation.

Effort 2 on testing, Effort 4 on landing the bloody thing.

>>1128294
>Reiko calls up Branu again, asks for instructions on how to enter the watermoon safely and warns them that they'll start testing things out if they don't get an answer within one minute.
>rolled 15
Branu grumbles about obstructed sunlight for photosynthesis, direct toxicity and/or dangerous algal blooms if all that metal is simply absorbed, potential superstitious interpretation as fulfillment of an apocalyptic prophecy, and various other indirect complications for the garden, but eventually acknowledges that you DID fulfill that priority request on schedule and, technically, within the explicitly defined parameters. Remaining requirements of docking can be handled station-side.

Underneath the ship's belly, water-retaining membrane puckers, twists, and extends out to meet the hangar bay's iris door in a column shaped like a frozen tornado.

rolled 3, 16, 5, 17, 16, 1, 11, 1, 19, 14, 19, 10, 8, 4, 4, 16, 16, 6, 7, 4 = 197

---

>>1128315
Cricket rushes in. Activating her chameleon cloak, along with creating a batch of debilitating poison to apply to her darts, she attempts to close on the action and find a suitable vantage from which to sneak attack potential foes. Trying mostly to hide and get close. She assumes that the group of humans are the one's they're supposed to rescue, but isn't quite sure yet, and furthermore, doesn't want to assume intervening won't make things worse. Lets try to get more information and get in position to make a decisive strike if needed.

>>1128370
>Cricket rushes in.
>trained in understanding numenera
>Vitruvius De Aquatectura (civil engineering manual regarding the matters of distributing water into/out of the ground)
>rolled 3
Hangar bay door controls present several options for dealing with the nonstandard docking interface and lingering errors in ship systems, which Cricket doesn't take the time to fully review before selecting 32 and 37: https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2016-10-17 Bypass the gravity spotlight's damaged control circuit by activating all the emitters at once with no throttle, shut down the vapor field and allow unrestricted gas exchange as soon as there's a contact seal.

Membrane-enclosed column hits the underside of the ship with a thump that audibly echoes off the far side of the world. (It's a small world, and sound carries well in water.) Edges are linked imperfectly, but a crust of ice prevents significant leakage. Water geysers up until the hangar bay is flooded more than eight feet deep, balconies in front of the exits reduced to short piers overlooking an Olympic-sized swimming pool full of kelp and jumbled-together combatants.

>trained in stealth
>chameleon cloak
>rolled 16
Cricket Moon moves among the new arrivals freely, won't be seen by any of them until she attacks or otherwise announces herself.
>trained in perception
>trained in initiative
>rolled 5
Those eel-like creatures aren't literally made of smoke - more like, partway between a jellyfish and an angry christmas tree. Spiraling translucent membranes around a more solid (or at least denser) central spine, shot through with ever-shifting speckles of bioluminescence. Hard to get an exact count, but there's at least three of them already aboard, and more arriving soon. Possibly an indefinite stream of reinforcements so long as the door is left open.
>rolled 17
Giant's tall enough all this water is only waist-deep. Seems to be taking charge, gathering up the five regular-sized humans and getting them moving toward the other pier, opposite of the side Cricket arrived through. Appears far less surprised by this situation than the rest of the new arrivals are.

Humans are four adults, and a child who... doesn't really have shoulders in the conventional sense. Head like a streamlined dog, neck way more flexible than ought to be possible, weirdly flat upper arms. Just finished getting that harpoon gun reloaded.
At the moment the adults are easiest to distinguish by their equipment:
)Full plate armor with swim fins, either hunchbacked or incorporating some well-protected cargo space,
)Coarse-woven net full of red melons and individually-padded glassware,
)Fancy axe which swings freely underwater, plus a stack of pentagonal wicker panels worn as a backpack,
)Gloves with metal studs which stun one of the eel-things on contact, and...
>rolled 16
...the one with the gloves, you recognize her face. Was years younger, didn't have a prosthetic eye or most of those scars yet, and it was just a still image in the blackmail dossier, but that's definitely Baron Tichronus's illegitimate daughter, Malia. The heck is she doing here?

rolled 16, 6, 5, 8, 3, 16, 4, 14, 19, 8, 19, 2, 12, 1, 3, 3, 13, 17, 18, 18 = 205

---

>>1128247
>Natalina huddles on Paprika's lap during chainpod ride to the sensor access hatch
With her girlfriend snuggled up in her lap, Paprika marvels at how light Nat feels in her arms compared to just yesterday. Whatever the ship did to her during that infusion, she's happy about it so far.

>at the back end of a crevice just slightly too narrow to crawl into, and roughly twice as deep as a human arm is long.
Did our conundary friend follow us, and can they reach it? Otherwise, Paprika can try and squeeze. I'll spend one speed effort.

>Hatch leading back to the main cargo hold is stuck shut, and feels warm, as if there were a fire raging on the other side.
>Heh. It's... it's probably fine.
Paprika remains her usual cheery self. "Honey you know I'm the best person in the Ninth World to get stuck in a burning warehouse with. We'll be alright!"

>sensor array rotates around to face the jungle-ocean of Branu's Kiss.
>Almost looks like that could be a form of language, or maybe abacus-work.
Paprika watches Nat stare intently at the monitor, still squeezing her tight. "...do you want to talk about it?"

>>1128394
>Did our conundary friend follow us, and can they reach it?
Conundary's back in the main cargo hold, weaving spatial distortions to keep all that molten metal off the terapede corpse, as well as other salvaged material that seemed appropriate to stash further away from the living quarters, but which isn't completely fireproof.

rolled 2, 15, 12, 18, 8, 3, 15, 3, 5, 9, 7, 14, 4, 15, 15, 6, 16, 13, 15, 19 = 214

---

>"...do you want to talk about it?"
"...this person we're here to rescue. She died, and has been dying, over and over and over, longer than there's been a ninth world. Because she keeps jumping out of Branu's bubble into the void and freezing and breaking into a million pieces and something keeps bringing her back. Paprika, that was almost us when we landed in the castle! And, hehe, I agreed to be paid in statues back in the City of Needles! What deal did she strike for the same destiny?"

>you know I'm the best person in the Ninth World to get stuck in a burning warehouse with. We'll be alright!"
"I just feel the urge to run, but there's no good way out of this Amontillado-cask right now. I could phase through the door, but I'm a lot less fireproof than you. You could force the door to escape yourself, but no-door between myself and molten metal is the same problem again (and could harm our living ship, besides). I could escape through the wall, but, hahaha- we know how that goes!" As Natalina's rapid-paced rambling rubs out of steam, she slows, hugs her girlfriend tighter and buries her face. "...I could just disappear in here." Spending 4xp to unlock the Invisible Phasing verb power.

>the sensor array rotates around to face the jungle-ocean of Branu's Kiss. Oddly, with the current display settings, it still resembles stars. Flickering and shifting around a lot more, though.
>specialized in all tasks involving physical performing arts
In a small voice, Natalina asks "Would you dance with me under this sea of pseudo-stars?"

Planning to spend a few minutes trying to calm. down with her girlfriend while the hold burns. Then, once she calmed down again, she'll turn her arkus-powers on seeing what those starry lights have to say.

>>1128315
Maybe they'll be able to help their host with some of that, if they stick around long enough. And you know, don't all die horribly. Leaving a mess is rude of guests, even if it was to save a life.

>>1128410
>dance
>rolled 2
Many mysteries of prior worlds are lost, but you can say with confidence that this hallway was not originally designed to serve as a dance floor. Won't be winning any awards, but you manage to avoid serious injury, and the various smaller, clearly recoverable, mishaps have a moderate calming effect.
>seeing what those starry lights have to say
>rolled 15
They were counting the stars above, inefficiently. Accompanying chants suggest it's a deliberately pointless https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Book and functionally interminable task, as 'proportionate' penance for some holy mission which ended in unrecoverable failure long ago.
Your ship's arrival - or, more specifically, so much of the visible sky suddenly being blotted out by bright molten metal which soon cools to a mirrored surface - is being interpreted as an omen of impossible, apocalyptic mercy. Vast swaths of yet-uncounted stars vanishing, replaced by gentler lights under local control, imply an opportunity to end the count early, set right what once went wrong.

The central matter to be "set right" is not spelled out (since they all already know), but Natalina is fairly sure it will involve committing violence.

rolled 2, 8, 19, 15, 5, 11, 8, 5, 14, 10, 1, 9, 7, 15, 9, 8, 2, 3, 8, 5 = 164

---

Reiko does a double check on the effects of metal-saturated steam on the ship's hull, then carefully attempts to rig the ship's systems to make a few quality parts out of the material by quarantining the superheated metal and quenching it in partitioned containers of the seawater. Look busy, look productive, and the adventurers might be fooled into thinking this is a mobile engineering base.

She also calls up Branu and tells him that he's not getting the water in the ship or its contents back, but mainly because it's about to become a vector for heavy metal poisoning and should be kept far away from the biosphere.

>>1128411
Reiko gets on the comms. (Intellect, Effort 2)
"Alright, kids, listen up! This ain't a charity, and it ain't an aquarium neither! Now, we're not heartless out here. Really; you need a ride, you don't need to pay up front. It's just that the fee is somewhere between 'sobbing uncontrollably' and 'driven stark raving nuts'. So: I'mma get Branu on the comm, and he's gonna tell me exactly how much he'll pay to deliver y'all to a specific location. Pray that his requested location isn't 'out the airlock' or your fee gets doubled... unless any of ya'd like to speak up, now?"

If they don't respond for ten seconds, she'll call Branu again, ask about the adventuring party that just stepped into the ship like they owned the place and how much their transport is worth, and finally they'll ask to clarify what Reiko and company need to do to save that person or something Branu was talking about, because Reiko's still kind of uncertain who it is they're saving or if they've already been saved.