But before I get into it, I posted this before, but just as a reminder: Sean got the ship's mini painted, so here we have the Void-Crowned Queen!
(More pics available here)
(Reminder: Due to John's work schedule, he's going to be effectively out of commission for at least a few sessions, including the two written up here. So as per our usual tradition, we're just going to handwave that his character is somewhere in the background until he can make it back, because I'm not comfortable with letting someone else take over a player character barring dire circumstances.)
So we start with the group getting the heck off of Castrovel and away from its jungles of pure madness and frustration. On the way back, Virxidor buys a body-concealing encounter suit to cover up his newer, stranger appearance. It takes them most of a week to make it back to Absalom Station, and when they get back they meet with Chiskisk to update them on what's gone on. Chiskisk is more than a little disturbed with the idea of the Cult of the Devourer chasing after the Stellar Degenerator, and he arranges to get some credits into their accounts from the Starfinder Society to help fund their further efforts to stymie the cult. They start asking if the Society would help them rob a bank for extra funds, and Chiskisk, unimpressed, sends them on their way.
While they're at the station, since they're chasing after the cult, Zar scrapes some stuff together to get the ship upgraded[0], particularly the weapons and shields and the quality of the crew quarters. The group gets a little bit of downtime working on this. During this, Virxidor undergoes mnemonic editing to process his experiences at the Temple of the Twelve.[1] and soon enough they're back out in their refitted ship. They're headed for the Diaspora, an asteroid belt about in the middle of the Pact Worlds system, which is mostly populated by pirates. Specifically, they're headed for a section of the belt called the Field of the Lost. There's a Drift beacon near there, making it easy to get there, but once they arrive they'll have some searching to do.
So they spend a few days in the Drift on the way to the belt, getting on each others nerves -- in particular, N1-C0 insists that the steering feels 'off' because of the upgrades[2], and that leads to some good-natured bickering. So they get there, and Virxidor sees on the instruments that there's a pirate ship nearby. It's a Nebulor Outfitters Starhopper, kind of a mid-tier explorer ship like the group's -- different model, but a lot of the same basic capabilities. They also recognize that it has markings consistent with the Free Captains, a band of space pirates operating out of the Diaspora. But just as they've noticed it, it's noticed them and has begun charging up weapons and defenses.
They hail the ship and Virxidor steps up to declare in his most dramatic voice that they're about to be blessed by the Void-Crowned Queen, piloted by "His Excellency Zar Z'ress." The intimidate roll goes as well as it possibly could -- natural 20, any rolled bonuses hit the max, the whole nine yards. The other ship hails them. Captain Alera Okwana of the Rusty Rivet wants to parley.
She invites them over to chat and sort all this out, and seems very sincere, but they insist on doing this over the comms with Virxidor pretending to be Zar's herald. But all the same, while slightly thrown off (she admits that she's kind of a newbie and is trying to build a name for herself patrolling the Field of the Lost looking for pirate hunters), she's legitimately friendly and helpful when they make it clear they're here hunting Devourer cultists and have no interest or designs on encroaching on Free Captain territory. She brings up a navigational chart and shows them what is officially designated Asteroid K9204, though she thinks the cultists call it the Star-Eater's Spine, "or something equally stupid." She sends them the chart and off-handedly mentions that she saw some "bone ships" headed that way earlier. They make a big stink about how she'll be remembered as being helpful by House Vexidyre and shut off communications as they take off towards the asteroid, grumbling about how they have no clue why the Corpse Fleet keep getting up in their business.[3]
They find it after a couple of hours. It's barely a mile across, and is mostly covered in rock- and ore-infused terrain, most of it jagged cliffs and the like. They give it a scan and determine it's dense enough to hold a thin atmosphere and some low gravity, and there's only one spot where someone could land a starship -- it has all of the signs of use, but there isn't anything currently parked there.
They park, and get out of the ship, and make their way into a nearby canyon. Cliff walls shoot up almost straight about 40 feet or so, and at the base of the cliffs is some sort of silvery ash. Up ahead, down one pathway, they can see sort of a stepped outcropping and head that way. Virxidor uses some of his new magic (that he hasn't told anyone about yet) to put together a telepathic network between the group without saying anything. N1-C0 gets concerned as the group looks around, and he checks ahead through the scope on his rifle. He sees a guy with goggles and a crazed expression looking back at him as he raises a sniper rifle of his own.
So a fight begins. N1-C0 stands back and trades shots with his rifle while Zar and Kech rush the stairs to get closer to the guy. Virxidor calls upon his new magic to launch fireballs at the sniper, startling everyone. They bring him down, especially once Zar gets up the stairs and launches himself towards the guy to knock him out. The guy's a sarcesian, one of the closest things to a native race the Diaspora has. They're 10-15 feet tall, have bulbous eyes, and can grow gossamer-like wings of light that let them fly through space -- and, in fact, can survive in vacuum for short trips.
Zar asks if there's any reason why they should keep the guy alive. He's not making a federal case out of it, just asking for basically any reason. Naturally, the subject of interrogating him comes up, and Zar's fine with that. While the others catch up, Kech asks Virxidor when he developed magical powers. Virxidor explains that when the undead solarian plunged his energies into Virxidor's heart, he saw the 'expanse of the universe' -- the elf had tried to make Virxidor like him, but for some reason (possibly because they worship different gods) it didn't fully work, and he came partway back to life and brought back a greater connection to the universe with him.
Then he says that he's kidding and just had some space weed and it opened his consciousness. Kech insists on believing the first explanation, however. Virxidor then calls out the fact that nobody thought it was weird when he used his magic to telepathically link them together but it's when he throws fireballs that they start questioning things. Kech, shrugging, explains that she assumed the telepathy was a device he whipped up.
Meanwhile, they've managed to wake up their captive. They start asking questions but he just jabbers incoherently at them. Kech and N1-C0 recognize that he's not speaking any language, and is probably hopelessly insane, and N1-C0 just puts him out of his misery without warning. While poking around his sniper perch, they find a leather-bound journal along with some abandoned camping gear. It identifies the sarcesian as Yex, who was apparently something of a pain in the ass and after a huge fight decided to take off for a while to cool down. He decided to camp out on the asteroid, but over time the entries get jumbled and incoherent. Worryingly, he makes references to a 'flesh beast' that over time he begins to call 'master.' Before the journal devolves into completely unintelligible gibberish, his last entry reads: "Yex keep scratchies away so master finally make Yex into skree YES." They take note of the fact that there's nothing about Yex that suggests he's a Devourer cultist.
From the description, Zar identifies that Yex probably came under the sway of an aberration called a 'skreesire,' a horrible monster with massive fangs, tentacles, and wings and the ability to control people. Normally the control is short-term, but you hit someone with it enough times and obviously their mind can go.
They look around some more, and take a closer look at one of the ash piles at the base of the cliffs. It's a mix of metal flakes, rocky grit, and space dust -- Virx suspects that this asteroid was the site of some sort of mining venture. And in the ash pile they find a rotted human corpse whose clothing bears all of the hallmarks of Devourer worship -- progress! And also a filthy ring of sustenance! (At this point, between aeon stones, rings of sustenance, and various biological capabilities, most of the group doesn't actually have to eat any more)
But having confirmed that they seem to be in the right place, the group moves onward as Zar goes back to warning folks about the skreesire, about its weaknesses (cold iron) and the fact that it's immune to acid (which means that Virxidor's disintegrator pistol isn't going to be helpful). But he comments again that it's a big ball of tentacles and wings and claws, and...
N1-C0: So it's your mother, then.
Zar: I can't rule out that it's her.
They pass by a small cave system formed out of the rock, and debate moving past it to look for a sign of where to go -- in particular, there's a glowing pool of liquid a little down the way -- but in the end they go back to the cave. They see some bat-like creatures hiding in the tunnels, and Virxidor tosses a grenade in to dislodge them as the group moves in to deal with them. Zar recognizes them as skreelings, young offspring of the skreesire that has taken up residence somewhere on the asteroid.
Once the skreelings are out of the way, some rummaging around the room turns up a pair of sarcesian corpses, as well as a human skeleton under some ash in one corner. The skeleton has a jagged hunk of metal sitting across it's lap with a logo for a company called "Imura Excavations." And behind the skeleton, the group finds a stack of silver bars, worth several thousand credits, and they tuck those away. Virxidor wants the skull as part of a larger plan, though he admits it's kind of gauche. But they all agree it's gauche enough that he leaves it.
But after clearing out the cave, they move onwards to a grotto with a pool of some sort of glowing green soup at the back behind a small 'dam' of rock, and propped up next to it is a robed corpse missing an arm. Virxidor spots signs of something under one of the ash piles there, and N1-C0 uses his rifle to blast at the ash from a distance and clears off enough of it to reveal what looks like a trapdoor!
Kech moves in closer to take a look, and then at the urging of a telepathic shriek in her mind she finds herself passing by it and walking towards the pool. Recognizing that she's likely under the control of the skreesire (which they haven't seen yet), N1-C0 rushes out and tries to tackle her to the ground, but misses. Virxidor shoots a flare into the acid in the hopes of doing something to whatever's in it, but it just lights up in a lot of pretty colors. But once Kech is close enough, it emerges, much as Zar said -- an aberration covered with wings and tentacles and, as a wise man once put it, "more teeth than the entire Osmond family." It lashes out at her with a tentacle, but she escapes from its grasp as the group opens up. Zar rushes up to the edge of the pool to lash out at it while N1-C0 opens fire. It manages to get a tentacle around Zar and drags him into the pool of acid, but by the time it can do so, Virxidor has punched a hole in the dam and drained out a lot of the acid. Zar escapes the acid, and as the group wails on it, he gets to deliver the killing blow.
They drag the robed corpse away from the spreading pool of toxic chemicals and look it over. It's very recently dead, maybe a week or so, and if the red and black robes don't give away its associations, the pendant marking it as a Devourer cultist definitely does.
But that's definitely a sign that they're in the right place. Virxidor uses his new detect thoughts spell and determines there's no minds underneath it (and, as I point out, maybe two, two and a half minds up top). He climbs down into a dark tunnel and walks forward, finding nothing but rock until he finds an airlock. The outer door is open, the inner door is closed, and it's only lit by a dim red light. No minds on the other side of the inner door, out to about 60 feet or so.
The rest of the group comes down, and they try to hack the airlock to cycle it and get it open. As they do so, they hear a hissing noise, and both Virxidor and Kech are hit with some sort of weaponized spores that mess with their mental processes. They get the inner door open, but they've been dosed with something.
They're in some sort of bunker. The only light comes from the screen on a computer terminal, and behind that is a hallway lined with pillars stretching onward and some doors on the sides, with something on the ground near the nearest pillar. This isn't a problem for the group, as everyone has darkvision.
They manage to hack into the computer, and decide to leave the lights off for good measure as they're at no functional disadvantage. There's very little accessible from this terminal -- it's mostly just some base operations stuff, though they can find references to a datacore that actually has files and logs that may be useful. There are two modules they can access, "Entrance Deterrent" and "Chamber of Devouring." They hack into it and can't determine what or where it is. There's some debate as to whether or not to switch it off, for fear that it's actually a containment system for something horrible. The fact that a couple of party members are having kind of a 'loose brain' day because of the spores doesn't help, but they decide to switch it off.
They approach the pillars up ahead and find a pile of gore next to one of them. Zar and N1-C0 poke through it for anything useful or informative. Zar, thanks to his background as a supervillain and coming from a culture big on arms dealing, recognizes the thoroughly-wrecked body as having been slain by a moving laser grid wall. He finds where the laser wall would have started, and that he's in its path, and they determine that this hallway was in fact the aforementioned 'Chamber of Devouring.'
Meanwhile, N1-C0 finds a patch from the being's uniform that he recognizes as a Corpse Fleet insignia. He shares this with the group, and they have a moment of "Why is the Corpse Fleet constantly up in our stuff?" and realize that once they get out of here, they're going to need to follow up on Eox.
And we left off there.
[0]-- For those who don't know, Starfinder has a system where as a group of player characters levels up, their ship (it's assumed every group has a ship) improves as well. They receive 'build points' they can put towards upgrades. These build points represent tinkering that's been done on the ship, or equipment that's been found or favors cashed in. In this case, the assumption is that Chiskisk gave them the extra funds for the upgrades.
[1]-- In other words, he uses a mnemonic editor (which is literally a respec device) to replace one of his mechanic levels with a level of mystic and tweak a couple of other things on his character (including switching from a drone mechanic to an exocortex mechanic, since N1-C0's stealth capabilities have far outstripped anything his drone can do for scouting purposes). And at the end of the last adventure, the group hit level 5 and he took that level in mystic as well.
[2]-- This is also kind of a meta-commentary on the fact that the difficulty of certain checks goes up with the ship's tier, meaning that it becomes harder to do some stuff as the group rises in level, for reasons that have been vaguely defined at best.
[3]-- Someone comments that odds are, they'll get there to find that the Corpse Fleet have wiped out the cult. Which means that if the cult followed their wild goose chase towards the sun, then some of them will survive because of that.
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