Speaking of which, just as a reminder that I'm going to be at Gencon this year, and I'm running another Æon game, a sequel to last year's. The game is currently full-up, but if anyone wants to drop by with generics just in case, it's Saturday at 6pm, at the Crowne Plaza. I'll be getting in Wednesday evening and leaving Sunday afternoon, and unless something happens and I have to bail at the last minute, I've got games I'm playing Thursday afternoon, Friday evening, and Sunday morning. Outside of those times, if anyone sees this and also wants to hang out at the convention, just reach out through any of the various social media channels and we'll see what we can do.
And now, on to Starfinder!
So where we left off before, the group had just fought a nasty Devourer cultist and a bunch of undead monstrosities, ransacked his ship, and headed in to the facility where it looks like the controls are for the Gate of Twelve Suns. They have trouble getting there -- weirdly enough, a system with twelve stars arranged in a circle has some very strange gravitational forces going on, and Virxidor has to do some extra math to figure out how to pilot the ship through them.
The crew manages to land the ship on the landing pad next to a cleared strip of jungle leading between said landing pad and a building of some sort. After landing, N1-C0 and Zar take a closer look and recognize that the strip of jungle was recently cleared with fire, explosives, and sharp instruments. As they travel the path, finding bits of the old service road destroyed and buried under soft earth from a recent rainfall, they can hear howls and screams of wildlife. Carnivorous plants occasionally attempt a half-hearted grab at them. One of them, I can't remember who, jokingly worries about hearing drums in the distance.
They do in fact hear a rhythmic pounding, heralding the arrival of a massive creature with way too many eyes and two big mouths called a jubsnuth. It barrels out of the brush at them, either pissed or hungry or both. Virxidor tries to startle it with ghost sound while everyone else piles onto it. And the whole thing becomes a fight: it hits them, they hit it, rinse and repeat. At one point it gets a grip on Malesinder and tries to eat him[0], and in the end N1-C0 manages to bring it down with a decent shot.
Zar takes some biological samples for later and they proceed to move on. And a short way down the path, they hear something telepathically shriek "Die!" into their heads as a creature that looks human descends from the sky. Its eyes are empty hollows, and its palms have fanged, drooling mouths as a grayish hazy halo tinged with red electricity crackles above its head.
Malesinder's so startled that he's left insensate for a moment while the creature -- a type of outsider called an atrocite, an otherworldly servant of the Devourer -- conjures up a whirlpool of space itself to pull everyone but Kech to the ground. They try to fight back, shooting at it as it flies away, with Malesinder pulling free of the whirlpool in in pursuit. Virxidor, however, manages to get free and finish it with a well-aimed shot.
The group is able to get to the building ahead of them, to find where some impatient individual blasted a massive hole in it rather than get through the door normally. They hear cruel laughter and cackling inside, and as they approach they see three humans decked out in their Mad Max finest torturing some local three-legged dog-like animal they've got trapped in the corner of the room.
Virxidor plays ephemeral trumpets using the ghost sound spell to announce the group's arrival, but without looking up one of the guys just yells "Turn that shit down!"
So he responds by hurling a force disk at them, and the fight is on. Zar manages to kill one with both hands, just grabbing on and dissolving his body with the unholy radiation he radiates. And Virxidor just guns down the last one. He also steps up to heal the animal with his magic, and with the implant that lets him converse with animals he tells it to warn the other creatures on the planet not to screw with the group. It runs off, more than happy to do just that. They rummage through the room and find some kishalee weapons (a pistol and some grenades) that run on some advanced science that Virxidor is just waiting for the chance to test out and take apart later.
The group ventures a little deeper into the facility, and find a room with that's dark with a single computer terminal up and running. Virxidor hacks into it (activating and then quickly switching off an alarm in the process) and turns on the power in the room, and a hologram fades into existence on a platform in the middle of the room.
They recognize her as one of the kishalee, dressed in some sort of not-quite-military uniform. She greets them, and quickly ascertains that they aren't with the group that's attacked the station, as well as the fact that some of them can speak her language but not everyone. So she does a scan of their minds and technology and becomes conversant in Common, much to Zar's annoyance. Their first concern is that she's a living hologram like the one they fought back in the museum on Istamak. She introduces herself as Osteth, and explains that she's not a program but an actual consciousness that's been uploaded into the system.
She explains that she's one of a couple of scientists who used to man the station. In order to maintain the systems past the collapse of the kishalee civilization, she and the other scientist uploaded their minds into the computers. The group proceeds to talk about how they met her 'backwater' 'dirt-worshipping' people on another planet, and they're flippant and somewhat dismissive until she points out that this is a serious situation and what they found was not representative of the civilization from which she comes.
The group realizes that given that Osteth might be the last remnant of what the kishalee used to be like, and maybe after all this is over they can get her to the kish in Istamak or find some way to put her in touch with any other surviving outposts. In fact, Virxidor's digging through the system has turned up extensive notes on how the consciousness transfer was accomplished. At the very least, he can easily move her into another system with some time to work at it.
(I'm sure I'm getting a few details wrong, particularly the order in which certain important points came up, it's not like I recorded the conversation)
But she explains that for untold millennia, she and the other scientist, Eltreth[1], maintained the systems from within the computer, but a few centuries back, he started suffering problems. She thought it was just some degradation of his consciousness, some technical problem, but he kept ranting about some entity called the Devourer that had somehow touched him. For safety's sake she trapped him in a server cut off from there rest of the facility while she tried to figure out how to fix him.
Well, a few days ago, a cell of cultists calling themselves the Desperate Hunger show up, going on about the Devourer, and before she could do anything about them they found Eltreth. They caught her off-guard, and released Eltreth and trapped Osteth in Eltreth's former prison. The group is naturally suspicious but as best as they can tell she's telling the truth. She laments that she built the prison so well, because they can't free her without getting to the control room and getting into the system from there. She also laments that if the group can get her consciousness free and trap Eltreth's in the virtual prison, she's almost certainly going to have to destroy him.
Fortunately, she can show them how to get to the control room to do this, but can't do much else until they can make the exchange (which Virxidor should be able to easily do, with the aforementioned consciousness transfer notes). She can't see anything else in the facility, and warns them that Eltreth may have set traps. But at the very least, Eltreth shouldn't be able to use the robots against them because Osteth's been working on uplifting them to full sentience for a while and there's a lot of custom code in there. She also makes sure they know that the Desperate Hunger is made up of more than a dozen main members, an unknown number of shadow creatures, an android, and a couple of ysoki.[2] She also shows them a map of the place and points out where they need to go.
Zar makes sure to reassure her that the 'right' group of indiscriminate killers (his term, not mine) is here to save the day and make sure the Stellar Degenerator is kept out of the wrong hands.
And we left off on the group heading out to take out the Desperate Hunger and take control of the operations center.
[0]-- Malesinder may be large, but the jubsnuth is huge, and so that's definitely big enough.
[1]-- Which is a name the group has heard before, in the voice mail left by the cell's leader.
[2]-- Not that she knows what ysoki are, but it's easy enough for her to show them the ratfolk via hologram.
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