Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

As the crew of the Vandervecken reached engineering, Taiwan got the jump on one of the few crew members down there. He shot one with his laser gun, a nonfatal blow. Other members of the crew stunned him, as well as another of Axinn's henchmen.

Then, from somewhere behind him, another henchman tried to brain Taiwan with a wrench.

He managed to just dodge it, fortunately, and then Carmella got the guy in the chest with her stunner. He crumpled over.

(For some reason, almost everybody's shots that night were hitting people in the chest. It's funny, because the way this is determined is by a role in the dice. This reminded me of my first session, when everyone was hitting the bad guys in the left arm.)

Now that the engineering room was cleared, at least temporarily, Steve started working to transfer control of the ship. Liang patched up the one injured crew member, with a little help from Carmella. Meanwhile, Taiwan pulled out a roll of duct tape and started taping unconscious henchmen together.

Another group of henchmen showed up at the doorway, which had been closed by Steve. Unfortunately, he made an error and the doors popped open. Naturally, the henchmen threw a grenade into engineering. This time, Liang's attempt to bat it out of the way failed. Even though she's doesn't have much of a throwing arm, Carmella tried and also failed. It looked like their fate was sealed when Steve managed to toss it away. It didn't make it all the way back to Axinn's men, who were standing in the hallway, unfazed, demanding the Vandervecken crew come out and face the music.

They probably didn't know what they were asking, because Liang did a shoulder roll into the hallway, and popped up in their midst. Two of Axinn's crew aimed at Liang's head, but he struck the one with the scariest weapon, who fell over onto his side, shooting ineffectually into the air.

The other henchman, unfortunately, got a shot off at Liang before Carmella took him down with a stunner shot. "Leave my monk alone!" she called.

She and Liang have developed a bond over the past few adventures despite their differences. Whenever they're just sitting around the ship, she enjoys teasing him about his highly developed moral sense, which, for example, has him running to his cabin to meditate whenever he feels that he has done something questionable.

Of course, G.M. and game creator The Cheshire Cat's joke about this is that somewhere, the Powers That Be sigh at Liang's adventures and keep knocking him down a peg for his next reincarnation. Right now, he's down to anteater.

They've been in enough combat situations together, often backing each other up, that Carmella knows he can be trusted, under fire, to act first and meditate later. Plus, they're also the two members of the crew with the best medical skills, so they often end up patching people up together, or stabilizing bad guys so that they can provide useful information before being stunned unconscious.

Katie got off some great shooting, and before long the Vandervecken crew were taping up more unconscious henchmen. This time, Steve managed to lock the door. Of course, it was no surprise when more arrived and stood outside the door, demanding they give themselves up.

Steve, meanwhile, had been doing everything from disabling their sensors to deleting the software that allowed them to fire their weapons. He changed the language on the ship's computer from Empire German to a language, Vair, that he speaks, as well as Mandarin Chinese, which Liang reads.

The henchmen were standing outside the door, so Liang tried to negotiate with them to buy some time. Of course that failed, because they were stubborn and unreasonable, goons sent down on a single purpose: take care of the boarders.

Carmella stepped in and tried to confuse them by asking if any one of them was Sven, because there was somebody there just barely conscious, muttering something about some room on the ship and something he had forgotten to turn off, and a critical failure. This confused them temporarily, but didn't deter them for long. They set off some sort of charge which breached the doors and then entered.

At about this time, The Paper, who was playing Katie, had to turn in because she had to get up the next day. Likewise, The Martial Artist, who plays Taiwan, and his wife The Book Lover, who'd been observing, had to head out. The Cheshire Cat told us to assume that Katie had left to guard the boarding pod and that Taiwan had hit his head during one of his attempts to dodge the wrench and was unconscious.

The fight continued. This time there were three, and they were easy to stun into submission. Liang used the opportunity to use his staff as a negotiating tool, hitting a pressure point on one of the conscious henchman and asking him how many more crew there were. He said there were four, and Liang, who's skilled at detecting lies, could tell he was telling the truth.

We paused the game to put our heads together to strategize. Since this game takes place far in the future, the assumption is that human beings have evolved even further and are a lot smarter than we the players. This makes it possible to suggest things to people but remain in character, because you, as a player, might not understand things that your character might. If someone else could think of it, it's possible the Big Brain could.

We got into a pretty good argument over it. Now that both Katie and Taiwan were effectively out of commission, you had two characters with highly developed moral compasses against Carmella, who, as her character sheet says, is "ethically challenged." They were talking about just inconveniencing the crew of the Axinn by messing with the ship and then leaving. But this foiled the whole purpose of the counterboarding mission, which was, after all, to scavenge parts. Carmella adamantly insisted they had to do that. After all, Taiwan and Katie would have wanted that, too.

Soon, they reached a compromise. Instead of taking the entire ship, they would just radio to the Vandervecken and get a list of the parts that would be required. (It's an interesting component of the game that the Vandervecken is a princess class cruise ship outfitted with many, many living spaces. Unless there's some in game reason that a given character is no longer on the ship, any character who has ever been on the Vandervecken is assumed to still be on board somewhere. This is why, for example, all the active members of the crew can just take off and leave the Vandervecken floating in orbit.)

Of course, by this point, the idea became that Liang would "negotiate" with the captain. Steve got him up on the communications systems. Liang told him that the Vandervecken crew was in a much better position than him, having complete control of the ship. Steve turned off the lights in the bridge, just to make his point.

Axinn, however, told them he was in control of the scuttling charges and would blow up the ship before he'd let anyone take it. Of course, this was no longer the goal. The goal was just to distract him long enough for Steve to work his hacking magic and for Carmella, after dragging unconscious Taiwan to the boarding pod, to zip around the outside of the ship in her space suit, cutting out and removing the parts they needed.

There were so many, she had to use a floating cart she found in the landing bay.

Liang said, "Well, it looks like we've reached an impasse. Would you find it acceptable if we just took some parts we need and get on our way?" Axinn was willing to consider this, depending on what the parts were.

As Liang ran down the list, Axinn kept nixing any of the important parts. Meanwhile, while he was saying no to sensors, Carmella was outside the ship using a laser to remove the sensors and stack them in the cart.

As he said no to weapons systems, Carmella was stacking up lasers and, to render Axinn more ineffectual, kicking his missiles off into space.

She also cut out their navigational gear. For good measure, she took out the roll of duct tape, which she had been using to tape up unconscious crew members, and taped a big "L" on the front of the ship for "Loser."

Then, back in engineering, she removed the most important and expensive bits of the ship, two of the most essential elements for a fusion drive, including the so-called fairy-cake, which powers it.

The task completed, Liang had managed to stall the captain for about 10 minutes, during which time Steve finished his hack of the system. This included setting a really bizarre password and changing the start up sound to the national anthem of a particularly backwater planet. He had also used this time to send a text message to the race leaders to let them know Axinn's ship, the Sunside, was dropping out of the race because he had violated the rules by ending his glimmer jump too close to the Vandervecken. The race leaders had responded, confirming the Sunside was now disqualified.

Still talking, Liang put his communicator next to the microphone so he could continue to talk to the captain while they were making their escape. Then, just for fun, the crew flew by the observation window of the bridge, waving at Axinn, pointing to the scavenged parts and mouthing, "Thank you."

As the crew docked at the Vandervecken, Liang had already made internal peace with his part in the adventure. "You know, karmically, he was a real bastard."

Further adventures from Confed:

Confed adventures index

Copyright 2005 by Alyce Wilson

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