Move 1 (Chapter 1.1)

[yhlee]

Time: CLASSIFIED
Place: CLASSIFIED

The tan-skinned woman, your contact in the resistance, doesn't introduce herself, but she has that efficient way of walking that suggests some form of military training, and she leads the twelve of you to the hangar where a trademoth awaits. The moth is painted with some kind of stylized insect symbol. "Technically this is a reclaimed pirate vessel," the woman says abruptly, "but we prefer to call it an entrepreneur. We've named it Wasp, mainly because the technicians couldn't be bothered to repaint it."

She faces you fully, unsmiles. "Let me be frank. In an ideal universe we would send a fully integrated team that had trained together. We don't have that kind of luxury. The twelve of you are the people available for this particular mission, so we're sending you."

The woman's expression smooths out a little. "We have been informed of an opportunity to recruit a Nirai defector, who is going by the name Remi, from a certain time period in the heptarchate. Not only are Nirai valuable because they can always tell what the date is--useful when you're time traveling, as you might imagine--this one claims to have invented a method for detecting rifts and predicting where they will take us, possibly even generating them. As some of you know from personal experience, rifts are unstable and figuring out where they will take you is not...exactly a science. That being said, there's always the possibility that Nirai Remi is a heptarchate agent. Stay alert."

She continues giving you details: the twelve of you will be crewing the Wasp, which is thankfully largely automated, to go through a rift and recover Nirai Remi on the other end from Station Moongray. Her briefing materials include some photographs of Remi, a handsome young man with curly hair and striking ice-violet eyes. Apparently this isn't the first time he's run into trouble with heptarchate authorities, and he's much more interested in continuing his research than getting into yet more trouble.

Remi will be expecting you. The woman is happy to leave the details of his retrieval up to you. In particular, there hasn't been time to do a thorough reconnaissance of Station Moongray, as there's some concern that the particular rift leading to Remi's time and place is unstable and may dissipate soon.

[GM notes: At this point, you should feel free to ask the NPC questions about the mission. You should also feel free to organize yourselves either in-character or out of character--is there going to be a command hierarchy? who will specialize in what roles aboard the moth or during the retrieval? cover stories and identities?--and discuss preliminary plans. You can also talk a little bit about how your character ended up here, if you like. It's fine to have multiple threads going for simultaneous conversations. Given that this is a forum RPG and we're mostly in different time zones, some of that is inevitable. If you have any questions, feel free to ping me--I'll be watching the threads.

Once the characters get underway, there should be plenty of room for interaction and flirting and whatever you like--this is mostly to get us started.--YHL]

Comments

[smokedetective]

Ashari taps their chin. "The smuggler idea has its merits, and though it's not perfect, I think we should go with it for now. Perhaps we could say that our crew only recently acquired the ship? Any discrepancies and failures in the maps could, for a short time, be attributed to us having a falling out with the seller and them deciding to screw us over. And since this Remi fellow seems to be an expert on Rifts, it will be just our stroke of luck that, even when our maps and systems failed us, we ended up on this of all stations!"

They flick one long blue braid over their shoulder, the mild distaste on their face hiding the true horror at the thought of being captured behind it. "There's no need to fall into the hexarchate's hands if we can just come up and shake them first. So what if we pretend we're relatively honest traders, put up some useless goods for sale as we refuel and try to figure out our tampered with maps? If push comes to shove or the trade opportunity arises, we reluctantly admit that in reality we're smugglers, and then bring out the exotic booze.

Getting Remi out with little suspicion is going to be more of a challenge, but I don't think it's that bad of a start, as far as plans go."

[zuhrovet]

"Actually," says Sasha, "What's wrong with Andan artist as the uppermost cover story? Maybe you hired us to image the rifts for an art project, and we got too close? If smuggling is our source of secondary funding, and not our ostensible goal, we don't have to look as competent at it."

[smokedetective]

"Oh," says Ashari. "Oh, that's good. I'm still a fan of the pleasure ship idea, that's more fun. But this is good, too."

They pause. "Though it still leaves the problem of them wanting to see our rift maps and images. It might explain our files being more scarce, but still, unlikely. An Andan sufficiently invested in the arts would hire only the best they could find." They turn to the contact. "No offense, but this ship doesn't look like anything close to the best. I might be able to dig up better a better crew if given a couple of months in the right location. But we don't seem to have the time or resources for that, do we?"

Then, they give Sasha a reassuring smile. "This is a very good idea, though. A good start. It's the cheapest and most easily sustainable concept anyone's come up with so far."

[zuhrovet]

"As Mother always said, when one is lacking in materials, one must embrace a simple aesthetic. Exposed bulkheads and intentional pixellation, mayhaps?"

Sasha is intentionally playing up her use of the singular impersonal pronoun, partly because she's annoyed at Ashari for condescending, and partly because the linguistics conversation makes her feel defensive.

[smokedetective]

Ashari raises their hands, palms out, in a placating gesture.

"Minimalism works for me," they say. "Like I said, yours is the most sustainable idea so far. We" --Ashari walks over to Sasha and stands next to her, then turns to inspect the ship-- " just need to expand on it. Perhaps we could say we got sucked into a bumpy rift with some unforeseen consequences? Or something else to explain the damage?"

[slybrarian]

"We could fake a malfunction in one of the exotic systems," Alaric volunteers. "In fact, give me calendrical data for that time and sector, and I can easily create some damage that would look convincing on inspection but leave us fully functional!"

He says this despite still being a bit fuzzy on exactly what the 'moth' part of a mothdrive was. Probably some sort of sail, right? If nothing else there was always the artificial gravity, which he could rewire in his sleep.

[smokedetective]

"Lovely! I think that would solve a lot of our problems," says Ashari, and looks over at Sasha, then around at those nearby. "You do.... intelligence and information? Right? That would be a help in sprucing up our logs and records to match up with the ship's appearance."