Hey there, folks, sorry it's been quiet here. Not a lot of news to add, as everyone should know by now how hard it can be to schedule gaming around the holidays. Speaking of which, I hope everyone's holiday season has been going well, and that everyone has a safe and pleasant New Year's Eve.
In other news, not that I think there's a lot of interest in it here in the first place (feel free to prove me wrong), I recently completed another chapter of Conversion and still need to upload it here, and will probably do so this weekend.
But this session will wrap up the fifth volume of Dead Suns, and next time we should begin the sixth and final volume of the adventure path, Empire of Bones.
And let's get on with it!
So we pick up with the group checking the other hangar to find the cultists' shuttle there, defended by a couple of hacked maintenance bots. They engaged with the robots so they could get on the shuttle and cut off the cultists' means of escape, and it seems too easy... until a couple of oblivion shade spawn emerged from the shuttle's hull to flank Zar and get in a couple of solid hits on him. He takes out one of them, Virxidor takes out the other, and Malesinder and Zar finish off the last robot.
They go into the shuttle and Virxidor hacks the craft's computers to take over the security system to keep the cultists from escaping. After all, why leave it to chance? If they'd had the firepower, they probably would have destroyed the shuttle itself, but having an extra vehicle laying around couldn't hurt anyways.
They venture back into the facility proper, going deeper, where they find a dwarf in power armor with a shoulder-mounted machine gun, chomping a cigar, guarding a set of double doors at an intersection.
"You ready to dance?" the dwarf grumbles. "Ain't seen nothing but hunks of metal, weird plants, and people made of light since we came to this system, and I've been just aching for a dance."
I didn't write down exactly what he said, but Virxidor starts in on the typical dwarf jokes, and the dwarf in the power armor -- known as Deldreg the Butcher[0] -- just gives him a big grin as if to say 'thank you' before opening up with the machine gun on the group. Fortunately, they're all armored or agile enough to dodge (or, in Zar's case, Malesinder's able to shield him from the automatic fire).
Zar closes the distance and manages to get a hit in on him, and Deldreg swings back. Malesinder moves in to help Zar engage with him in melee while Virxidor backs them up with magical mental attacks. Deldreg really decks Malesinder and tries to make a run for it, but Zar moves to cut him off. Malesinder then hits him across the back with his dragonglaive such that he spins the dwarf around to face him, and takes the Butcher's head off.
Rather than go straight for the double-doors, the group checks a side-room, where they find an ysoki decked out in leather and piercings messing with a computer. However, Malesinder goes in first and gets jumped by cultists who overheard the fight against Deldreg and were waiting for the group. Virxidor taunts the ysoki, calling him 'hamster ball,' and Zar tells him they've got his sister. Disbelieving, the ratfolk asks them "Yeah? What's her name?" but they don't have an answer because they never bothered to ask her name.
So a fight breaks out and Malesinder goes after the ysoki. At one point, Virxidor hits him with magic missile, and we have this exchange:
Zaz (the ysoki): You dick! You hit me in the piercing!
Virxidor: I'm a dick, you don't even know your sister's name!
But the beating continues until the ysoki surrenders. Virxidor and Malesinder take out the remaining cultist with the elf's psychoactive eye implants and some more violence while Zar takes the rat's gear. Zaz tells them where their leader is and offers to take them to her but for obvious reasons they don't trust him.
They stop to rest and then check the rest of the facility to find a place to stash Zaz. They find a room with a jammed door that, upon scanning by Virxidor's x-ray specs, appears to be a bathroom, but it's occupied. Zaz points out that that none of the Devourer cultists have been in there since they arrived, which means that whomever was in there was there when everyone arrived.
Nobody's been alive in this facility for millennia. So Zar asks the obvious question: "Is there an ancient toilet zombie in this room?"
The answer is 'yes.'
So they decide not to bother with whatever's in the bathroom and move to the next room, which features a couple of opaque force field tubes along the walls. Virxidor and Malesinder go in while Zar watches the ratfolk out in the hallway. Virxidor examines the equipment and determines there's a couple of living creatures being held in stasis, and through the force fields he can barely make out that they're large monstrous humanoids with bladelike arms.
So they quickly back out of there and Virxidor starts to close and lock the door. Then they realize they could just stash Zaz in there and let that take care of itself. Zar suggests rigging the computer so if anyone does anything at all to mess with it, it opens the force fields. So they could just leave the little bastard to his fate. Everyone likes this idea, and Virxidor goes in to make the necessary modifications.
And then as soon as Virxidor does anything at all to mess with the computer, the force fields open and two horrifying bug monsters emerge. Out in the hallway, Zaz knowingly cackles with manic delight as Malesinder covers Virxidor's escape from the room. Zar, disgusted with having his few efforts at mercy spurned, grabs the ratfolk's head and slams it against the wall until he loses consciousness. They get out of the room and lock the door shut to leave the bug-monsters in there. They explain to Zar what happens, and he remarks that whomever came up with that trap was a diabolical genius. He also remarks that they probably deserved to get their head bashed in.
(The camera pans down to focus on Zaz's unconscious body.)
They check the end of the hallway to find a mostly-cleaned out armory, but manage to find some weapons that had been stashed away and never retrieved (including some interesting kishalee tech that Virxidor plans to reverse-engineer at some point), and then go back to the intersection and open the double-doors.
The doors open to reveal a room with multiple control panels and monitors, all in front of a translucent force field, though which they can see the bore through the center of the planetoid. The walls are lined with all sorts strange technology, and countless maintenance robots scramble over every surface like ants. The monitors seem to be following four in particular.
An android woman with pink hair stands between the control panels and the force field, but she doesn't get much of an opportunity to talk before the characters throw in a bunch of grenades and slam the doors shut. Afterwards they barge in while she's slowed down by a kishalee temporal disruption grenade. But despite that, she's still agile enough to dodge one of Malesinder's strikes -- through she's not fast enough to dodge a shot from a kishalee disruption pistol that Virxidor has drastically overcharged for extra damage.[1]
Zar engages with her in melee and the maintenance bots show up, one of them holding the control board they've been looking for. One of the bots hands her the control board and she tries to make a run for it, but they manage to stop her. So now they've got the bots to deal with. Virxidor manages to literally molecularly smear one into the wall with a critical hit off of another charged disruption pistol[2], and Zar and Malesinder quickly deal with the other robots.
So they take the control board and drag Zaz back to the ship, at some point fully restraining and gagging him. They hoof it back to Gate 1. While Virxidor and Malesinder install the control board and work on getting the systems up and running, Zar goes and gets the ratfolk's sister out of the room where they stashed her. The drow hauls her onto the ship and sticks her in a cargo bay where he's also stashed her brother, whereupon he flies the ship out of the atmosphere and spaces them.
He gets back to find out that everything's ready, they just have to wait for the appropriate window of time to activate the demiplane, since they can only do that once per day. So the group takes advantage of an opportunity to rest, recover spell slots and t he like, and also go back to Gate 2 to drag the Devourer cultists' shuttle back to Gate 1 in case they can get some use out of it (or strip it for parts).
As the time approaches, Osteth suggests a plan for destroying the Stellar Degenerator: Board it and pilot it into one of the twelve suns that make up the gate. Sure, they'd have to find a way off after, and they don't know what sorts of security systems are still in place, but it's the only way to be sure that they can do enough damage to it to destroy it.
The group takes note of that,and instructs Osteth to open the demiplane. She begins the procedure, and then frowns after a few moments.
"My friends, something is terribly wrong," she begins. "Thanks to the gate's advanced age, several microprocessors across the controller moons' core facilities are failing. Unfortunately, I have already initiated the subroutine to open the demiplane. My calculations predict that unless something is done in the next few minutes, a catastrophic chain reaction will destabilize the system's twelve cosmic strings and cause each and every one of the suns to be pulled into the center of the system. Such a collision would result in a massive supernova... and the Stellar Degenerator would remain safe within its demiplane!"
The consoles around the room begin running a series of simulations at rapid speed, all of which end with flashing red screens -- except for one.
"Yes. I think I have it. If I split my consciousness across the twelve controller moons, my own programming could provide the necessary corrections for our plan to proceed. But I may not be able to pull myself back together. It could be the end of me. Permanently." Osteth pauses a moment before continuing. "This is the only choice. The rest will be up to you. You must promise to destroy the Stellar Degenerator, no matter what happens!"
They do promise (and might even mean it), making a note to come back and see if they can pull any of her off the computers later. Her holographic form dissolves into lines of code and the consoles surrounding them begin to glow blue. Several monitors display views of the interior bores of the other controller moons. Traces of the same blue light limn the circuitry along the walls and the army of maintenance bots. A moment later, the building shakes and all the monitors switch to perspectives from the planetoid's surfaces pointing toward the skies. In each, different angles of a colossal tear in space forming can be spotted in the distance. The fiery red of the planar gate contrasts with the inky blackness of space in a display that is both beautiful and awe-inspiring. This all happens within the span of 20 minutes.
They can see all sorts of readings on the consoles. The demiplane is open, the entrance a half-million miles across and currently stable. There's a massive conical vessel inside, easily over 100,000 feet long and a mass of 50,000 tons. It's made of a material they've never seen before, though parts of it are encased in rock like it's been built into an asteroid. It gives off about as much energy as a docked starship and has a small amount of its own gravity.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Stellar Degenerator.
About a minute later, warning lights go off on the consoles. The automated defense systems are warning that there are incoming ships entering the system. The readings confirm the worst: There's an armada of Eoxian-style ships approaching, ranging from speedy vessels to lumbering capital ships. They're only a few hours away.[3]
It's the Corpse Fleet. Like, a massive chunk of the Corpse Fleet. They've somehow tracked the group here, and they've arrived to collect the Stellar Degenerator.
And we leave off there, where next session we begin the sixth and final volume of the Dead Suns adventure path: Empire of Bones.
Have a happy New Year, folks!
[0]-- No, really.
[1]-- The blaster itself has the option to spend extra battery charges to increase the damage, and then Virxidor's mechanic abilities give him the ability to overcharge the weapon for extra damage. The sort of thing where you may get, like, two attacks off a single battery but each one is worth multiple normal shots.
[2]-- Kishalee disruption weapons can damage the molecular structure of objects. This still mostly just works like regular damage, but can have some special effects.
[3]-- That may seem like a lot, but to put it in perspective, it can take a few hours, give or take, to get from one controller moon to another in this system.
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