(Ref Note: Credit were credit is due, some of the ideas for Ganulph's moon were lifted from a forum thread. Though there were significant changes. The original inspiration is related, but in allot of ways only vaguely. It doesn't feel right to not mention it.)Once again we return to the crew of the 'Unforgiving Boon' Aspiration Class Minimum Capability Barge and their recovery from a tragic jump failure. With the distress beacon sent into orbit, the ship descends through the murky clouds of a moon of Ganulph. Carik, a veteran belter, tunes the scanner to pick up dense objects and a suitable landing site. 4 Contacts come out from an otherwise rough rocky plateau, 1 being the highest rock formation and most suitable landing spot on the otherwise wet planet, the others being dense but loose structures. Veln makes mention on descent, reminding the crew that they have just enough fuel to complete the descent and perhaps move the ship once. He makes mention of a few other cursory items in the ship's locker that might prove useful (An industrial anchor gun, 200' of wire, and all the tools the K'Kree used in placing the Unforgiving Boon upright when it crashed, in addition to some portable fuel tanks and hoses).
Carik chooses the most hospitable landing site. The barge fires it's retro thrusters in the last few minutes of decent and assists the anti gravity drives before landing in the thick mud of the planet. It sinks briefly before settling still. The doors open as quickly as the K'Kree engineer Veln bolts through the doors. In the distance upon the fell air, the sounds of distress emanate. A man screams for help in the distance in between coughing and the sounds of vomiting. He is desperately clawing through the thick mud in a half run/crawl. The planet is covered in a thick fog making visual recognition almost impossible beyond 9 feet.
LaChuck and Tookie use their infrared goggles to point him out in the distance; Behind him many more heat sources. Their lasers, hampered in the fog, are slung in favor of revolvers and the tricked out ACR. The crew manages to down the assailants behind the wounded man before he claws his way onto the craft, shoving Strenek aside and attempts to gain access to the ship. He is coughing, his face bears the signs of some sort of pox. His baby-blue jump suit uniform, tattered and dirty, is covered in blood and the evidence of knife wounds. A faint insignia is on his shoulder, that of the "Belgaurdian Soujorn Navy". Veln and Stenek eventually subdue the crazed man with their stun sticks before he gains access to the interior of the ship. Obviously sick and dieing of his wounds, the crew attempts to mend him and sets him to rest on the top cargo deck, hence forth referred to as "The Quarantine Zone".
The assailants are primitive and spoke briefly in an old unidentifiable solomani dialect (ref note: German, but the PCs wouldn't know). They were armed primitively with daggers made of bone, hewn of a faint metallic shiny substance and one of a large cudgel made of corroding metal. The group wore only the most basic of leather clothing and foot waders, aside from one obviously larger individual whose dress was somewhat more ornate.
LaChuck loots the leather and carries the bodies into the mist and buries them.
The ground holds tracks incredibly well and a path is easily followed to the north west, roughly in the direction of one of the densomiter contacts. The crew suits up and begins to follow the tracks with Veln keeping the ship secure. After some discussion he powers the ship down to all but the radio and doors in order to preserve power.
The crew makes to a site after about 5 hours of slogging through the, at times, thigh deep mud. It is obvious a scuffle occurred here. Tracks lead in different directions, chaotically. Blood appears to have been spilt and has mixed with the mud; trailing back toward the landing site. Tracks continue to the south west and again to the northwest in a rough proximity of the contact.
The crew continues to follow the trail to the densomiter contact. They arrive to see the nose cone of a up armored far trader protruding from the mud- it's transponder emanating an incredibly weak signal GK. Besides the Belguardian Soujorn naval insignia, there is some nose art and a name "The Lucky Witch". All that remains of the Lucky Witch is the cabin section and a window.
A crude survival tent lays next to the ship, torn and battered. Within it, several bone knives and a neatly stacked and cleaned set of human bones.
"Oh Great, we saved a psycho path" mentions LaChuck.
After some discussion, Streneck levels his laser carbine at the window of the craft and breaks it. Moldy air comes rushing out in a quick blast and the ground around the ship bubbles slightly.
Carik jumps into the cabin and fiddles with the dead cabin, attempting to power it up to no avail while the others descend into the lower depths. They open doors and find little of interest.
LaChuck, deep within the ship finds a door that is hard to open. He pries it open successfully and air once again streams out of the ship violently.
The Lucky Witch tilts slightly and the silty mud begins flooding around LaChuck, he desperately begins running back to the ladder to the top deck while the earth around him quickly entombs him. The rest of the crew quickly evacuate back through the window with little problem.
LaChuck narrowly crawls out the window as the Lucky Witch gives one last exasperated gasp.
The party collectively scratch their heads on how to recover from this. An Intelligence + Mechanics check was offered for a suggestion from the Ref, Strenek passes and I remind them of the anchor gun back on the ship. Not long later they figure that the Unforgiving Boon could be used as an anchor point from which the Lucky Witch could be hoisted from the mud. But it was a gamble.
The move to the next densomiter contact away from any trail.
They come across after roughly 10 hours of slogging through the mud to a group of heat signatures in the distance. A large group of humans are sifting through the mud as far as they can tell. They opt out of confrontation and successfully stealth around them.
Several other groups of people are found and none pay any attention to them. Before long the frequency of the groups lessens and the ground becomes softer and softer, deeper and deeper.
Wading through waist deep mud the crew moves at an ever decreasing pace. The party considers this for a second and presses on.
Carik, gleefully chewing on a meat like substance from the week's worth of rations that they have notices that he is not keeping pace. He begins to work faster and struggle to keep up, only, he is sinking. The ground rises up around him to roughly chest deep during this attempt to free himself. He yells to the others, spitting out the food he was eating. LaChuck runs toward him as the mud rose to Carik's chin and grabs his still visible arm, and embraces Strenek with his other. Before long Carik's face sinks below the soupy mud (and the character sheet is handed over). LaChuck himself, burdened with a platoon's worth of ACR ammo, ammo for weapons he does not have, Glisten-issue combat armor, and a pawn shop's worth of assorted goods begins to sink himself.
He releases Carik and begins to struggle himself, sinking rapidly. In a desperate, and bitter sweet, move he unbuckles his armor, lets go of all his equipment and rations, and he is pulled to safety.
(Ref Note: At this point the player of Carik begins to inscribe on the densomiter map pictures of his character as a ghost and that they were all "DoooOOoOOoomed".)
With LaChuck in nothing more than a skin tight speedo designed to work with the combat armor, they trek back to the Unforgiving Boon. As they pass another large group of humans, Tookie investigates closer. The humans are naked and eating the dirt. They also appear to almost completely blind however as she gets closer they all raise their heads in her direction and begin yelling "INTERLOPER!?" "InterLOPER?!" "inTerLoper!" in old Vilani.
The surviving crew double time it back to the ship. On the way back however, LaChuck realizes they may not have quite the food problem they thought they had. He scoops up a handful of the soil and swallows it... and vomiting back onto the ground the contents of his stomach.
Veln, startled by the savagery he has already witnessed just after landing. Immediately notices that 1 of them is dead and questions them about it. LaChuck points out he has no armor either and that the sand took him in. Veln releases his guard.
Weighing their options they realize the only pilot of the ship is dead and question Veln as to whether or not he can pilot the craft. He responds with a hazy "Are you crazy?". Further investigation reveals that he does have some knowledge, but isn't proficient.
The Unforgiving Boon, at once renamed -since Captain Carik was dead- to 'Enterprise 69' then hazardously glides by way of Veln over to the Lucky Witch where it landed like a marble into a bowl of oatmeal. The airlock opens and the stewy mess of the surface of Ganulph pours into the ship but otherwise did nothing.
The crew then tethers the Lucky Witch to the Enterprise 69 and winches the top half of it above the surface. A gaping hole in the side of the craft is plainly visible, evidence of some sort of weapons fire. LaChuck begins to patch it with the tools at hand. The rest of the crew explore the lower depths of the ship and shovel out compartments where necessary.
The lower engineering bay is sealed off however and required some work to open the doors. A raw stench leaves the room. And as the doors eventually come loose it reveals the rather horrific sight of a Belguardian Sojourn Officer who had committed suicide some month before. Her name was "Lt. Kouniko".
The crew then properly takes stock of the Lucky Witch. It's a Belguardian Sojourn Lancer strike craft with most of it's armaments mostly functioning with some repair aside from the gaping whole in the hull. The Jump Drive, however, was completely shot. LaChuck deems the ship "LaChuk Special 69", to a collective groan from the group.
The fuel tanks however, were still charged with 55 tons of refined fuel, which is way more than what the Enterprise 69 needed to jump away. Immediately the crew ran the hoses necessary to fill the ship through the decks of the ship and out the air lock and into the broken window of the Lucky Witch.
(Ref Note: At this point I began making endurance checks against LaChuck to see if caught the disease the wanderer had. He failed, miserably. I passed on a note that he felt sick. He then stopped helping the team and raided the ship's medical kit for anti biotics.)
The pumping operation began without a hitch... until later a horn blew in the distance. It was a terrible sound, the sound of a war horn. 12 warriors emerged from the distant mist charging at the ship. Carik was given control of the war band and the fight ensued.
A desperate struggle began immediately in the air lock with Tookie chucking stun grenades out like beads during Mardi Gras; Strenek made pot shots into the mist. Stripped of his armor, and now wearing civies and a flack jacket looted from the cops on Overnale, he assisted Veln and tried to get the fuel on board faster.
Downing several of the war band but not stopping them the warriors piled into the air lock, grappling Strenek to the ground as Tookie shot into the distance with her revolver. The bone knives proved mostly ineffective against Strenek and his TL14 combat armor, even when prone and being stabbed repeatedly.
Tookie unsheathes her saber and valiantly begins to stab and shove the attackers out of the air lock. Just as Streneck rights himself to re-enter the action, a large man, dressed ceremonially like a war chief from before, wielding one of the large cudgels swings at Strenek knocking him back a step but otherwise unphasing him. Another warrior tackles Strenek again before Tookie can loose his blood into the airlock. The pitched fight continues desperately as the seconds tick away and the hydrogen hold fills.
The hydrogen tank is filled! With blows still being traded, Veln runs back down to the controls and fires up the craft. The airlock is then shut, severing the still live hydrogen hose leading back to the Lucky Witch. It writhes about with force, injuring some of the attackers.
(Ref Note: Observation; Carik should have, during the many grapples that he won with Strenek, opted to drag him out of the airlock and to the waiting crowd outside instead of attempting to stab him right then and there.)
As the ship slowly leaves the ground, LaChuck takes one of the surviving, but injured, attackers and turns the airlock into a make-shift guillotine. The top half of the attacker tumbles back to the earth before the other half is kicked out.
(Ref Note: Another check was made for the disease, this time with a +3 modifier for the antibiotics and it was failed again... So his body wasn't going to fight it easily or at least the antibiotics contained nothing to help him. He subtracts 3 from his endurance. His sickness is now apparent to everyone else.)
The crew now has to face the other dilemma. When they came to Ganulph they had only 1 week worth of rations and no more on the ship. While on Ganulph they consumed another day and a half and lost all of LaChuck's. Strenek advises that the rations be stretched out over the stay in jump space. LaChuck then demands his debt from Strenek be paid out in the form of his combat armor to which Strenek obliges and lets LaChuck wear the armor.
(Ref Note: I considered this undue stress for LaChuck's illness. The accommodations of the Enterprise 69 made it even less bearable and accounted for that in all future rolls for the disease.)
Veln plotted the next jump handily after getting their bearing toward the next closest star (and only one within range) and slowly, methodically, pulled the ship into jump space. The jump was inaccurate, but not a misjump.
Over the course of the stay in jump space, LaChuck's condition continually disintegrates with a roll being made every day in jump and failing (now with modifiers from his damaged endurance) every endurance check but 2.
He is placed in the "Quarantine Area" with the now dead body of the wanderer.
Upon reaching their destination, Elseson, LaChuck is afflicted with rampant diarrhea, vomiting, dizziness, constant sweats and shakes. His face is riddled with red pock marks and he is incapable of rapid movement. The combat armor is thoroughly ruined of ever attaining a pleasant aroma.
It is apparent that his situation is so dire that he needs immediate medical help.
Eleson is a temperate world around it's equator with it being completely inhospitable any far north or south of it. The Enterprise 69 follows a landing beacon down to a crude starport devoid of any recent activity- or life.
(Ref Note: At the time I didn't know the name of the planet because the PC was out of commission. Turns out I guessed right. Go subliminal consciousness?)
A droid emerges from a nearby corrugated metal shack and rolls up to them, bidding a pleasant arrival and asking of their purpose on Eleson. Tookie asks for medical assistance to which the droid points toward a metal shack on the other side of the landing field. Seeing LaChuck slither as much as walk out of the ship, vomiting his way down the steps, the droid loads him onto the back of itself and carries him over to the shack. LaChuck tries to curse the ghost of Carik, but fails his endurance check and spills the contents of his stomach over the side of the droid.
The shack itself was almost devoid of use. The doors cracked and groaned as they opened in the droid's presence revealing a series of robotic armatures covered in plastic sheets. The droid leaves LaChuck on a table and removes the plastic coverings. Turning to Tookie, he proclaims "The machines are now yours" before whisking away.
Tookie looks at one of the computer displays and, not having a relevant skill to operate the machinery, attempts blindly to "probe"(per verbatim) LaChuck. The machine accepts the strange command that she entered-executing it to the best ability that it understood.
The table straps LaChuck down. Buzz saws and various armatures come to life careening toward the coughing bewildered LaChuck. Quickly Tookie and Strenek attempt to turn the machine off and, grasping electrical cords and hammering on the display, are cut short as the saw cuts the breast plate off of LaChuck before lunging into his chest cavity- spraying his life across the room. The robotic arms begin careful removal of entrails and organs among the dieing screams of the sick ex-star marine.
He was burned in a funeral pyre along with the body of the wanderer (and the character sheet was turned over).
Carik chooses the most hospitable landing site. The barge fires it's retro thrusters in the last few minutes of decent and assists the anti gravity drives before landing in the thick mud of the planet. It sinks briefly before settling still. The doors open as quickly as the K'Kree engineer Veln bolts through the doors. In the distance upon the fell air, the sounds of distress emanate. A man screams for help in the distance in between coughing and the sounds of vomiting. He is desperately clawing through the thick mud in a half run/crawl. The planet is covered in a thick fog making visual recognition almost impossible beyond 9 feet.
LaChuck and Tookie use their infrared goggles to point him out in the distance; Behind him many more heat sources. Their lasers, hampered in the fog, are slung in favor of revolvers and the tricked out ACR. The crew manages to down the assailants behind the wounded man before he claws his way onto the craft, shoving Strenek aside and attempts to gain access to the ship. He is coughing, his face bears the signs of some sort of pox. His baby-blue jump suit uniform, tattered and dirty, is covered in blood and the evidence of knife wounds. A faint insignia is on his shoulder, that of the "Belgaurdian Soujorn Navy". Veln and Stenek eventually subdue the crazed man with their stun sticks before he gains access to the interior of the ship. Obviously sick and dieing of his wounds, the crew attempts to mend him and sets him to rest on the top cargo deck, hence forth referred to as "The Quarantine Zone".
The assailants are primitive and spoke briefly in an old unidentifiable solomani dialect (ref note: German, but the PCs wouldn't know). They were armed primitively with daggers made of bone, hewn of a faint metallic shiny substance and one of a large cudgel made of corroding metal. The group wore only the most basic of leather clothing and foot waders, aside from one obviously larger individual whose dress was somewhat more ornate.
LaChuck loots the leather and carries the bodies into the mist and buries them.
The ground holds tracks incredibly well and a path is easily followed to the north west, roughly in the direction of one of the densomiter contacts. The crew suits up and begins to follow the tracks with Veln keeping the ship secure. After some discussion he powers the ship down to all but the radio and doors in order to preserve power.
The crew makes to a site after about 5 hours of slogging through the, at times, thigh deep mud. It is obvious a scuffle occurred here. Tracks lead in different directions, chaotically. Blood appears to have been spilt and has mixed with the mud; trailing back toward the landing site. Tracks continue to the south west and again to the northwest in a rough proximity of the contact.
The crew continues to follow the trail to the densomiter contact. They arrive to see the nose cone of a up armored far trader protruding from the mud- it's transponder emanating an incredibly weak signal GK. Besides the Belguardian Soujorn naval insignia, there is some nose art and a name "The Lucky Witch". All that remains of the Lucky Witch is the cabin section and a window.
A crude survival tent lays next to the ship, torn and battered. Within it, several bone knives and a neatly stacked and cleaned set of human bones.
"Oh Great, we saved a psycho path" mentions LaChuck.
After some discussion, Streneck levels his laser carbine at the window of the craft and breaks it. Moldy air comes rushing out in a quick blast and the ground around the ship bubbles slightly.
Carik jumps into the cabin and fiddles with the dead cabin, attempting to power it up to no avail while the others descend into the lower depths. They open doors and find little of interest.
LaChuck, deep within the ship finds a door that is hard to open. He pries it open successfully and air once again streams out of the ship violently.
The Lucky Witch tilts slightly and the silty mud begins flooding around LaChuck, he desperately begins running back to the ladder to the top deck while the earth around him quickly entombs him. The rest of the crew quickly evacuate back through the window with little problem.
LaChuck narrowly crawls out the window as the Lucky Witch gives one last exasperated gasp.
The party collectively scratch their heads on how to recover from this. An Intelligence + Mechanics check was offered for a suggestion from the Ref, Strenek passes and I remind them of the anchor gun back on the ship. Not long later they figure that the Unforgiving Boon could be used as an anchor point from which the Lucky Witch could be hoisted from the mud. But it was a gamble.
The move to the next densomiter contact away from any trail.
They come across after roughly 10 hours of slogging through the mud to a group of heat signatures in the distance. A large group of humans are sifting through the mud as far as they can tell. They opt out of confrontation and successfully stealth around them.
Several other groups of people are found and none pay any attention to them. Before long the frequency of the groups lessens and the ground becomes softer and softer, deeper and deeper.
Wading through waist deep mud the crew moves at an ever decreasing pace. The party considers this for a second and presses on.
Carik, gleefully chewing on a meat like substance from the week's worth of rations that they have notices that he is not keeping pace. He begins to work faster and struggle to keep up, only, he is sinking. The ground rises up around him to roughly chest deep during this attempt to free himself. He yells to the others, spitting out the food he was eating. LaChuck runs toward him as the mud rose to Carik's chin and grabs his still visible arm, and embraces Strenek with his other. Before long Carik's face sinks below the soupy mud (and the character sheet is handed over). LaChuck himself, burdened with a platoon's worth of ACR ammo, ammo for weapons he does not have, Glisten-issue combat armor, and a pawn shop's worth of assorted goods begins to sink himself.
He releases Carik and begins to struggle himself, sinking rapidly. In a desperate, and bitter sweet, move he unbuckles his armor, lets go of all his equipment and rations, and he is pulled to safety.
(Ref Note: At this point the player of Carik begins to inscribe on the densomiter map pictures of his character as a ghost and that they were all "DoooOOoOOoomed".)
With LaChuck in nothing more than a skin tight speedo designed to work with the combat armor, they trek back to the Unforgiving Boon. As they pass another large group of humans, Tookie investigates closer. The humans are naked and eating the dirt. They also appear to almost completely blind however as she gets closer they all raise their heads in her direction and begin yelling "INTERLOPER!?" "InterLOPER?!" "inTerLoper!" in old Vilani.
The surviving crew double time it back to the ship. On the way back however, LaChuck realizes they may not have quite the food problem they thought they had. He scoops up a handful of the soil and swallows it... and vomiting back onto the ground the contents of his stomach.
Veln, startled by the savagery he has already witnessed just after landing. Immediately notices that 1 of them is dead and questions them about it. LaChuck points out he has no armor either and that the sand took him in. Veln releases his guard.
Weighing their options they realize the only pilot of the ship is dead and question Veln as to whether or not he can pilot the craft. He responds with a hazy "Are you crazy?". Further investigation reveals that he does have some knowledge, but isn't proficient.
The Unforgiving Boon, at once renamed -since Captain Carik was dead- to 'Enterprise 69' then hazardously glides by way of Veln over to the Lucky Witch where it landed like a marble into a bowl of oatmeal. The airlock opens and the stewy mess of the surface of Ganulph pours into the ship but otherwise did nothing.
The crew then tethers the Lucky Witch to the Enterprise 69 and winches the top half of it above the surface. A gaping hole in the side of the craft is plainly visible, evidence of some sort of weapons fire. LaChuck begins to patch it with the tools at hand. The rest of the crew explore the lower depths of the ship and shovel out compartments where necessary.
The lower engineering bay is sealed off however and required some work to open the doors. A raw stench leaves the room. And as the doors eventually come loose it reveals the rather horrific sight of a Belguardian Sojourn Officer who had committed suicide some month before. Her name was "Lt. Kouniko".
The crew then properly takes stock of the Lucky Witch. It's a Belguardian Sojourn Lancer strike craft with most of it's armaments mostly functioning with some repair aside from the gaping whole in the hull. The Jump Drive, however, was completely shot. LaChuck deems the ship "LaChuk Special 69", to a collective groan from the group.
The fuel tanks however, were still charged with 55 tons of refined fuel, which is way more than what the Enterprise 69 needed to jump away. Immediately the crew ran the hoses necessary to fill the ship through the decks of the ship and out the air lock and into the broken window of the Lucky Witch.
(Ref Note: At this point I began making endurance checks against LaChuck to see if caught the disease the wanderer had. He failed, miserably. I passed on a note that he felt sick. He then stopped helping the team and raided the ship's medical kit for anti biotics.)
The pumping operation began without a hitch... until later a horn blew in the distance. It was a terrible sound, the sound of a war horn. 12 warriors emerged from the distant mist charging at the ship. Carik was given control of the war band and the fight ensued.
A desperate struggle began immediately in the air lock with Tookie chucking stun grenades out like beads during Mardi Gras; Strenek made pot shots into the mist. Stripped of his armor, and now wearing civies and a flack jacket looted from the cops on Overnale, he assisted Veln and tried to get the fuel on board faster.
Downing several of the war band but not stopping them the warriors piled into the air lock, grappling Strenek to the ground as Tookie shot into the distance with her revolver. The bone knives proved mostly ineffective against Strenek and his TL14 combat armor, even when prone and being stabbed repeatedly.
Tookie unsheathes her saber and valiantly begins to stab and shove the attackers out of the air lock. Just as Streneck rights himself to re-enter the action, a large man, dressed ceremonially like a war chief from before, wielding one of the large cudgels swings at Strenek knocking him back a step but otherwise unphasing him. Another warrior tackles Strenek again before Tookie can loose his blood into the airlock. The pitched fight continues desperately as the seconds tick away and the hydrogen hold fills.
The hydrogen tank is filled! With blows still being traded, Veln runs back down to the controls and fires up the craft. The airlock is then shut, severing the still live hydrogen hose leading back to the Lucky Witch. It writhes about with force, injuring some of the attackers.
(Ref Note: Observation; Carik should have, during the many grapples that he won with Strenek, opted to drag him out of the airlock and to the waiting crowd outside instead of attempting to stab him right then and there.)
As the ship slowly leaves the ground, LaChuck takes one of the surviving, but injured, attackers and turns the airlock into a make-shift guillotine. The top half of the attacker tumbles back to the earth before the other half is kicked out.
(Ref Note: Another check was made for the disease, this time with a +3 modifier for the antibiotics and it was failed again... So his body wasn't going to fight it easily or at least the antibiotics contained nothing to help him. He subtracts 3 from his endurance. His sickness is now apparent to everyone else.)
The crew now has to face the other dilemma. When they came to Ganulph they had only 1 week worth of rations and no more on the ship. While on Ganulph they consumed another day and a half and lost all of LaChuck's. Strenek advises that the rations be stretched out over the stay in jump space. LaChuck then demands his debt from Strenek be paid out in the form of his combat armor to which Strenek obliges and lets LaChuck wear the armor.
(Ref Note: I considered this undue stress for LaChuck's illness. The accommodations of the Enterprise 69 made it even less bearable and accounted for that in all future rolls for the disease.)
Veln plotted the next jump handily after getting their bearing toward the next closest star (and only one within range) and slowly, methodically, pulled the ship into jump space. The jump was inaccurate, but not a misjump.
Over the course of the stay in jump space, LaChuck's condition continually disintegrates with a roll being made every day in jump and failing (now with modifiers from his damaged endurance) every endurance check but 2.
He is placed in the "Quarantine Area" with the now dead body of the wanderer.
Upon reaching their destination, Elseson, LaChuck is afflicted with rampant diarrhea, vomiting, dizziness, constant sweats and shakes. His face is riddled with red pock marks and he is incapable of rapid movement. The combat armor is thoroughly ruined of ever attaining a pleasant aroma.
It is apparent that his situation is so dire that he needs immediate medical help.
Eleson is a temperate world around it's equator with it being completely inhospitable any far north or south of it. The Enterprise 69 follows a landing beacon down to a crude starport devoid of any recent activity- or life.
(Ref Note: At the time I didn't know the name of the planet because the PC was out of commission. Turns out I guessed right. Go subliminal consciousness?)
A droid emerges from a nearby corrugated metal shack and rolls up to them, bidding a pleasant arrival and asking of their purpose on Eleson. Tookie asks for medical assistance to which the droid points toward a metal shack on the other side of the landing field. Seeing LaChuck slither as much as walk out of the ship, vomiting his way down the steps, the droid loads him onto the back of itself and carries him over to the shack. LaChuck tries to curse the ghost of Carik, but fails his endurance check and spills the contents of his stomach over the side of the droid.
The shack itself was almost devoid of use. The doors cracked and groaned as they opened in the droid's presence revealing a series of robotic armatures covered in plastic sheets. The droid leaves LaChuck on a table and removes the plastic coverings. Turning to Tookie, he proclaims "The machines are now yours" before whisking away.
Tookie looks at one of the computer displays and, not having a relevant skill to operate the machinery, attempts blindly to "probe"(per verbatim) LaChuck. The machine accepts the strange command that she entered-executing it to the best ability that it understood.
The table straps LaChuck down. Buzz saws and various armatures come to life careening toward the coughing bewildered LaChuck. Quickly Tookie and Strenek attempt to turn the machine off and, grasping electrical cords and hammering on the display, are cut short as the saw cuts the breast plate off of LaChuck before lunging into his chest cavity- spraying his life across the room. The robotic arms begin careful removal of entrails and organs among the dieing screams of the sick ex-star marine.
He was burned in a funeral pyre along with the body of the wanderer (and the character sheet was turned over).
