(So this is Chris from the future chiming in. If you're looking up my Starfinder stuff, you'll notice this is the last post. This is because, well, Covid basically did in our gaming group's ability to meet in person as well as fucking up everyone's time and schedules. I apologize that it just leaves off right at the beginning of the sixth Dead Suns module. Couldn't be helped.)
But having scheduling difficulties has given me a bit more breathing room to get this post done, so that's something.
So where we left off, the group had just arrived at the Empire of Bones, and were creeping into an open hangar bay. There's a field blocking debris from the outside, but everyone has to keep their suits on because there's no ship-wide life-support. After all, why would there be?
Having just released a bunch of fighters, the hangar bay is empty... except for one corpsefolk marine doing maintenance on a small craft. The group immediately braces themselves to try and pull the same scam on this guy that they did with the marines, but the way they're coming in unannounced already looks sketchy enough for him that he fires up the craft he's working on and opens fire.
The fighter is small enough and the hangar is big enough that he's able to move around, shooting at them while Malesinder and Zar fly and propel themselves (respectively) around the hangar bay, playing flying-attack tag with him. Virxidor shoots open a window into a control booth for the hangar and dives in to take control of the crane, while Malesinder manages to damage the fight enough that it crashes and skids to a stop, and the corpsefolk soldier pops out.
Malesinder and Zar advance on the guy while Virxidor commandeers the crane and decks him with it, and Malesinder tags him and Zar dramatically runs up and vaults over the ship to finish him off with a supernova-burst.
No alarms have been raised yet, so Virxidor spends some time poking around the control room. There are a pair of zombies cybernetically hooked into the consoles, with wires going from their brains into the ceiling, but they don't seem to notice or acknowledge him. He then focuses on the systems in the room but discovers these terminals aren't really connected to much else on the ship. There's a map of the local region of the ship, referred to as 'hangar country,' but many of the rooms are blanked out on the map and just listed as 'secure sites.' Malesinder points out this sort of separation of data is pretty standard in an organization like this, and that probably what they want is the nearest security post, probably in one of the blanked out rooms.
They take a closer look at the zombies wired into the computer. It's pretty obvious that they receive orders from elsewhere on the ship and work the terminals as appropriate, but are otherwise typically mindless zombies. Zar figures out that the systems for issuing them commands is as much magical as it is technological, which on its own makes them harder to hack. If there were signals coming in that the group could observe in real-time, Virxidor could potentially find a way to hack them, but these aren't being used for anything at the moment so there's nothing to work with.
They take a closer look at the map and the surrounding area -- there's an empty ready room nearby, and there's something referred to as the 'gravel pit,' where it looks like the Corpse Fleet keeps something called a surnoch, a worm-like creature that burrows through rock, which probably gets put to use in mining operations. Another room appears to be full of junk with some scavenger slimes kept in it for some larger purpose, but they decide 'screw that.' In the end, they focus on the secure sites.
They wander the hallways, somehow not drawing any attention, and they pick the largest room first. Virxidor looks through the door with his x-ray visor and discovers that it's a room full of those cybernetic zombies, hooked up to terminals. They consider whether to go in and poke around or not, and while they're debating Virxidor gets an idea to go and get the armor from the marine they took out, and see if he can use it to con their way deeper into the ship or take control of the room or something. So he heads back, only to cross paths with a security patrol of robots painted to look like skeletons.
The resulting fight moves around the hallways as the robots shoot at Virxidor -- and Zar, when he moves in to assist. Malesinder takes the longer way around to get behind some of them. Vixidor uses grenades to disable the robots long enough for Zar to move in and do some real damage, while Malesinder hits them with his fire breath. Virxidor remembers he's got the sovereign helm he found in the Gate control facility, and uses it to take control of one of the robots, directing it to shoot at another. Zar manages to grab one and channels the entropic energies he channels as part of his solarian abilities to rust and corrode it. And between another of Zar's supernovas and Malesinder's dragonglaive, they take the rest of the robots apart, leaving only the important question: Why the hell does the Corpse Fleet have robots at all?[0]
They decide to check a different room. They actually have trouble getting the door open, but when they do a bunch of air rushes out of the room. Inside is a table with straps on it, manned by a drow nihili. They rush him, and manage to take him down pretty quickly. It looks like this room is for interrogations, with atmosphere that can be switched on and off, manned by the nihili -- an undead that can make people feel like they're suffocating -- for torture purposes. Delightful. They go through the room and the nihili's stuff, but the only thing that stands out is a security key located in a compartment in the room's controls. The key looks like a USB drive designed to resemble a humanoid finger bone. Which, y'know, might be useful.
Virxidor uses his visor to check the last two rooms they haven't seen yet. One of them has pillars and digital displays and there's a single individual in there with a uniform. The other appears to be a brig with some dwarves waiting for an ambush.
They decide to try and get into the brig, again having trouble with the door -- yet, they notice, no alarms are going off. But they get the door open and the dwarves try to snipe them from compartments in the floor. The group had gone in hoping they could talk these folks down, but apparently the dwarves (who are also undead) already had other plans (presumably, to kill the characters and take their ship). They trade shots with Virxidor while Zar and Malesinder move in and swiftly take them out.
In the brig they find a weapons rack, with some gear taken off the dwarves and stuff taken off other prisoners. There's a really nice set of armor for Malesinder and Zar finds a rare kind of solarian crystal called an 'apocalypse crystal,' so called because it's found in the ruins left behind by a living nuclear holocaust commonly called a 'living apocalypse.' There's also a bunch of glowing gems, which Zar uses up in an improvised ritual to move some enchantments from his current solarian crystal over to this new one. They also find another one of those security keys.
They move to that last room, and eventually get that door open. There's a single officer in there, a type of undead called a pale stranger. Sort of an undead gunslinger.[1] She's surrounded by monitors of the nearby hallways and rooms, and a couple of the monitors are playing footage of the characters' previous fights -- she's been watching and studying them.
She gives them one chance to surrender -- she doesn't want to fight them, just dump them on another section of the ship so they can be someone else's problem. They refuse and Virxidor opens up with a barrage of ectoplasmic bolts. Malesinder and Zar charge in. She manages to get a decent shot on Zar, dodging his attacks because she knows how he moves, and sets off a grenade planted in the doorway to hit the drow and the dragonkin in the back. But they're slightly too fast for her, and Malesinder drops her.
They find another security key on her, and use the security keys and her hand (to pass a biometric lock) to hack the console. As this is the security post, the computer here has full access to the ship's main computer. The system is just too complex for Virxidor to hack, though -- the systems are too vast, too distributed, and it would take months for any sort of hacking to propagate through the entire computer. He might be able to take control of a single thrust or sensor array in the short term, but any sort of wide control is going to require control of the bridge and, preferably, a command link in cybercontrol. Which means they have to get to the command section.
They also find files on Captain Ghurd Nashal, identifiable as a mohrg from the description, who runs the ship directly. And then there's Admiral Serovox (who's the character with the staff and glowy skull-thing on the cover of the module), who doesn't do a lot of the day by day but is one of the leaders of the Corpse Fleet as a whole. And then Virxidor finds something called Project Tombstone in the personal files of Commander Malakar (the pale stranger).
What's Project Tombstone? It looks like Malakar's been plotting a little bit of mutiny for a while. She's got a bit of beef with some of the folks on the command staff, and was planning on perhaps creating or facilitating some sort of incident that could be used to embarrass them. It becomes obvious that the characters would have been a perfect opportunity for this, though she's been planning something for a while. She's been aware of and deliberately suppressing alarms from the characters' activities.
Virxidor also finds out that she's spent most of the last year feeding a pair of viruses into the Empire of Bones's computers. The first, called Wraith 2.0, can effectively vanish one or more individuals from cameras and the robots if you have their images to feed into the system. It won't get anyone into a high security area, but it'll blank out the characters' presence on cameras (within reason) and cause robots to ignore them.
The other virus is called TombRobber, and can be used to fake security alerts using the images of anyone 'loaded' into the Wraith 2.0 program. The alerts are tailored using an algorithm to almost surgically keep security away from a specific area. It costs a security key each time (so it's got finite uses), but could hypothetically be used to, say, buy a group of adventurers time to get a night's sleep.
Virxidor wastes no time taking the characters' images and loading them into Wraith 2.0, and he plots out a route to the command section. The ship is big enough that it has its own internal train network, but conveniently there's a station nearby.
So armed with this new info and a little bit of help from the computers, the group takes off down the corridors. They pass another robot security patrol on the way -- but all the robots do is look at them, pause a moment, and then move on.
And we left off there! Stay safe and healthy, folks.
[0]-- In all seriousness, my guess is that it's so they've got guards that can't be thwarted by command undead or similar spells. Also, intelligent undead are overqualified for the standard, banal sort of guard work and mindless undead are underpowered for it.
[1]-- I'm not normally a guy who geeks out over fantasy monsters, but look these things up sometime, they're pretty neat.
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