Crucible, Part One

Scene 1:

• Open with Ella Stanbridge being interrogated by unknown agents, then flash back to the moment of escape.
• Crew are racing toward malfunctioning gate, having rescued Sae who is grievously injured thanks to his escape pod getting damaged.
• Pass through malfunctioning gate, which hyper-accelerates the Aimless Pilgrim far faster than it is designed to handle which hurls many of the crew into bulkheads and the like, resulting in many broken limbs. Chief Engineer Enzo Arabejo is grievously injured when his skull is smashed into something.
• The Pilgrim is boarded by freaked out and trigger-happy marines. Several of the PCs realize that the unit patches worn by these armored marines indicate this is Gazulin, some 53 parsecs away from Corfu!
• As the crew is taken aboard a strike carrier, Aris and Haank are able to see where the Pilgrim emerged from: one of Gazulin’s moons. And it has melted.

Scene 2:

• For the next thirty days or so, the crew are kept isolated from one another and repeatedly interrogated about how they managed to Jump so close to the sub-sector capital.
• Eventually, as their stories seem to add up, they are relocated to a lower security prison but the interrogations continue, albeit sometimes in groups and now with more scientists than intelligence spooks.
• Everyone notes that Ibrahim seems more detached and quiet than normal but he passes it off first as a bad reaction to the drugs he received during interrogation and then due to his ‘break-up’ with Lorain.
• Admiral Gloval manages to obtain the crew’s release but is forced to do some missions for Gazulin Intelligence. He also reveals that Enzo lived, but the engineer suffered severe brain damage due to the accident and is currently in a hospice for treatment.
• The crew departs Gazulin at the earliest opportunity, their initial destination: Peridot.

Scene 3:

• The Pilgrim heads to Peridot but does not land; they refuel then jump to a seemingly empty system though Gloval knows better. He informs the crew that he has been instructed to scout out some abnormal activity detected here.
• Eventually, a very faint transmission is detected in-system which leads them to a seemingly derelict INS Drake. The large corvette-sized vessel is mostly powered down and Ella takes her crew aboard with Armin flying the launch.
• The crew boards but finds everything pretty much powered down; Haank attempts to reactivate the auxiliary power unit but it fails quickly, indicating that the batteries have been expended. Ella decides to split the team – she, Abe and Aris will remain on the bridge to monitor while everyone else accompanies Buck to the engineering section to power systems back up.
• Reaching the forward engineering compartment requires manually opening several hatches, but eventually they reach their destination and Buck begins bringing systems online.
• Abruptly, the Drake lurches forward and its weapons systems inexplicably fire, damaging the Aimless Pilgrim! Buck automatically reaches for the manual shutoff … but his hand freezes in mid-air!
• And then, the Drake makes a surprise Jump…

GM Notes:

• I (Rigil) have officially taken over GM duties for this campaign. I’ve been jonesing to run some sci-fi for a while now and my original intent – “run a one-off adventure” – quickly morphed into a potentially massive story arc that could take an entire year or more to finish. As this would mean nobody else has to run for a while, there haven’t been any complaints.
• Due to school and other real life obligations, Loki had to bow out of rejoining us so Armin has been relegated NPC status. The same obviously holds true for Abe, my PC.
• Since we’re livestreaming our games every Saturdays (6:00PM Eastern) at Ronnke’s Twitch channel and then later uploading the stream on the YouTube channel, we’ve decided to dial back on the extensiveness of the recap to just the overall outline..