Alright, time for some Starfinder. This'll be a short write-up (and, universe willing, the last one without John for a while), but it leaves off on a good leavin'-off spot and it looks like the next one might be delayed a couple of weeks so I figured I'd get this one out of the way.
And here we go!
So where we left off, the party had broken into a Cult of the Destroyer bunker, disabled a laser grid deathtrap, and found evidence that the Corpse Fleet has been poking around. So now they've got a hallway ahead of them that goes to a dead end, with doors to the left and right. N1-C0 sneaks ahead through the left door, into a gloomy and oppressive hallway with a red light flashing from one wall.
Zar comments that the sinister red and black coloring scheme of the place comforts him, which in turn comforts literally nobody else.
The hallway's clear, and N1-C0 picks a door and goes into some living quarters. They're empty, aside from some sleeping pallets, dressers, and little shrines of skulls, or metal shaped into profane symbols, that sort of thing. The walls are covered in some sort of graffiti that he recognizes as Abyssal and can kinda-sorta guess at. Kech, looking at the graffiti in another such room, calls Zar in to take a look. Given that Zar's a drow, and most drow are demon-worshippers, he's pretty fluent in Abyssal. The phrasing isn't consistent from room to room, but the graffiti basically says "The Entropy of Existence is known." He recognizes the meaning of it as referencing an obscure holy text of the Devourer Cult, called The Entropy of Existence and the Glorious Rise of the Void, which was written centuries ago by an evil elven soothsayer named Nyara and contains ominous prophecies.
N1-C0 ventures a little further into the complex where he finds what appears to have been a raided arsenal. There's a handful of wrecked-up security robots and some shelves with a few broken weapons on them. The robots seem to have been destroyed recently by laser fire, maybe a week at the outside. The broken weapons don't seem like much at first, but Virxidor's able to repair them with his new magical abilities, so a few of them might be worth something and a couple are even worth keeping and using. They also find some sort of weird tech partially encased in meat, that they recognize as a damaged necrograft, an augmentation that had been made from undead flesh and likely implanted into an undead body. They head back through the series of linked living quarters, basically going down one side of the bunker, looking for stuff and finding some cash in one room and some equipment in a trapped dresser in another.
Also, alongside the cash, they find a datapad. N1-C0 hacks it and there doesn't seem to be anything useful on it, until he finds a video file labeled "Do Not Delete." In the video, a gnome and a verthani (a tall, gangly species from the planet Verces) sit cross-legged on the floor of the living quarters, wearing robes festooned with assorted unholy symbols of the cult. The verthani is teaching the gnome to sing a paean to the Devourer, which apparently includes the phrase "Nyara knows!" chanted over and over.
As they reach the back of the bunker on their side, they find a disgusting sight -- a mess hall filled with rotten, abandoned food, like the cult got up in the middle of a meal to leave and never came back. But other than the destroyed security robots in the arsenal, there haven't been any signs of a fight. They wait out the wave of nausea that overtakes Zar before N1-C0 keeps scouting forward. He finds the computer room, the one likely to have the datacore they've been looking for. There's a reptilian creature on the floor that's been dead a few days, and an identical living creature standing over it. They identify it as a veolisk, often called a 'void basilisk' because it has a gaze that can temporarily drive people mad by overwhelming them with the depths of the void of space.
Virxidor tries to talk to it, using his augment that lets him speak with animals, and he manages to get a bit of a dialogue. It tells him that its mate is dead, 'killed by bones.' It's obviously pissed and looking for something to lash out at, but he manages to calm it down enough that it won't attack the others. While he's doing this, N1-C0 is using his stealth module to try and invisibly hack the computer, but he's having difficulty doing it on his own. So he ducks out of the room, becomes visible, and comes back so he doesn't startle the creature. With Virxidor's help, N1-C0 gets into the computer, and they find a bunch of information.
N1-C0 finds records of their recent communications (including the false message that Virxidor sent trying to trick the cult into going to the sun), particularly messages they received from Tahomen, the man who led the cultists they encountered on Castrovel. They find, among other things, the message he sent to the cult right before his encounter with them (which he'd incorrectly predicted was about to go very differently than it did): "Our future awaits, far beyond the confines of the Star-Eater's Spine! You must fly, my sisters and brothers! Fly to (garbled static), where the Key awaits..." The garbled static seems to be where another hacker, having accessed the information, scrubbed the name out as well as any data that would have served as a clue as to where the cultists went. This access was pretty recent, and doesn't match anything in the rest of the computer, suggesting a third party -- likely a Corpse Fleet hacker.
They also find that this particular sect of the Devourer Cult is focused on the divinations and prophecies of Nyara, from the aforementioned The Entropy of Existence and the Glorious Rise of the Void. They find a particular prophecy is flagged as high priority, and they can bring up a hologram of the elf reciting "In the maw of the Twelve lies the Key. Forsooth, shall all be undone. When the knee meets the gorge, so far. The widening gyre implodes -- magnificently." They remember the Twelve as interpreted by the elves in the Castrovel ruin, the ring of twelve stars that might be a gateway to a demiplane containing a superweapon.
So this lines up with what they know so far -- the cult thinks the Oatian elves learned of (or at least deduced) the existence of the superweapon (called the Stellar Degenerator), which potentially confirms a prophecy that the cult was already aware of. And as they haven't found any corpses aside from the undead in the laser hallway and the veolisk, it looks like the Cult's already on their way to Ibra knows where and the Corpse Fleet is playing catchup while trying to shake other pursuers.
So with that filed away for the moment, no pun intended, they go through the other half of the base, rummaging through living quarters and such until N1-C0's advance scouting reports a couple of functional security robots in the armory. They try to lure them out by tossing a smoke grenade in to get them to go through the choke point that is the doorway, with Zar taking charge (literally) to start smashing them up. After they wreck up the first, the other ducks back into the smoke for concealment, but Kech manages to thoroughly end it with a lucky shot. Virxidor keeps the spare pieces in case those might be useful at some point, while the other find some broken but fixable (though clearly decorated by nihilist edgelords) armor left behind. There's some solid pieces, too, especially some sweet heavy armor behind a hidden panel that's damn near perfect for Zar (after prying off the skulls with a screwdriver and the obligatory repaint).
But by now, they've swept through the bunker, and it's become clear that the Corpse Fleet have gotten involved and covered their tracks. Problem is, they can't track the Corpse Fleet, but they know someone who probably does... While the Eoxian government has officially disavowed the Corpse Fleet, their friend Ambassador Nor, as the liaison to the Pact Worlds, has the literal job of being at least one of several go-to guys for any Corpse Fleet shenanigans. So they plan to head back to Absalom Station, check in with Chiskisk, go over their equipment, and talk to the ambassador.
So they head back out, explore a little bit of the asteroid they missed on the way in and find some cultists killed by the skreesire (though not enough to account for everyone who would have been in the bunker), grab some useful gear, and head out. There's a little interruption on the way, though...
As soon as they leave the asteroid, a pair of Death's Head Necrogliders fighters with Corpse Fleet markings move to engage. But between the upgrades that Zar applied to the ship the last time they were at the station and N1-C0's fancy flying, they're able to make short work of them. Zar and Kech focus fire with the new weapons and rip through the ships' shields like tissue paper and disable them with strikes guided by Virxidor's targeting systems. Once the fighters were disabled, the group hit them with their EMP cannons for good measure before interrogating them, but the fighters' pilots didn't know anything useful.
So that means the group is on its way back to Absalom Station where Ambassador Nor awaits!
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