Session 2: An unexpected Visitor

Please refer to the resource list, overview, intro, and Session 1 for more info. Note that this is the Second session.

After some short deliberation, repairs on the habitat continued, as the Belter Techie got the fusion generator back online, the AGI hacker got the industrial grade fabber back online and began construction of necessary comms gear, including a Far caster (which was luckily an included BP in the fabber’s database).

The crew also installed omniscient surveillance on the entire small asteroid the hab is located on and inside the hab as well. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to detect the first visitor to the facility since the crew of ‘the dump’ took it over.

Appearing on the mesh (which was left open, because no one had thought it necessary to take care of cyber security this far from civilization), the crew started receiving messages from a user no one had seen on the mesh before, and quickly came to the logical conclusion that someone had joined them on the asteroid.

The interloper, going by “Roland (the Great)” on the mesh, continued to hide his physical location and taunted the party several times, accusing them of having ‘nuked their captain’ and that it would be his pleasure to harvest their egos for the bounty.

Before the group had a chance to inquire about any of the accusations over the mesh, an explosion went off in one of the hallways between the mining dome and the laboratory dome. The crew was noticeably rattled, aside from the scum warrioress, who had not been coping with the isolation from transhumanity (and her lover) well, and had barricaded herself in her bunk, and oscillated between binge drinking and deep meditation periodically.

Nonetheless, the remaining crew attempted to fend off the unseen attacker. The criminal/assassin/Kingpin esque crew member, who was more kingpinesque in this fateful battle, attempted to track down the attacker, along with the AGI hacker, the techie, and the very confused mad monk. Eventually the crew (minus the Warrioress) were able to find and subdue the attacker, without really attacking him all that much. Instead they revealed to him their Xp’s of the destruction of ‘the dump’ and he decided it was in his best interest to believe them (that and this was wayyyy more interesting than trying to cash in on the bounty out on them).

Roland (the Great), as he calls himself, explained that he was making his way from the outersystem to the inner system in the longest ‘unshipped’ voyage evermade by a transhuman. Roland (the Great) explained that he is an adrenaline junky and makes most of his F-rep from crazy stunts, like free falling into Mars from orbit while in  melee combat with both an octopus and a gorilla (it made a lot of headlines several years back, mostly by uplift rights groups claiming the uplifts involved had no choice in the matter).

This most recent stunt of Roland (the Great)’s, required that he sleeve himself into a Ring Flyer morph, which was itself heavily modified, and brought along a mental specialist AGI to help him deal with the extreme isolation of deep space. The crew agrees privately, that Roland (the Great) is f%$#ing nuts. He explains that he happened to be very close by (in sol terms) and made a hard burn for them after receiving news from experia claiming the crew had assasinated their captain as part of some sort of retaliation for either another hypercorp or possibly for a rival criminal organization to 9 lives (though Levas had left nine lives sometime ago… somehow..). The Bounty on the crew stood at 200,000 and was being funded entirely by the late Emerald Levas (clearly re-instantiated from a back up), and the bounty had appeared to have wiped out all of Levas’ savings.

The crew then spent a bit of time discussing these facts and reflecting on them. The AGI hacker concluded that the bounty was pitifully small and not much to worry about, since Roland (the Great) would likely be the only one to have been an a position justifying coming all the way out here to cash in on it). He also concluded that Roland should not have been proven dead and re-instantiated that quickly, especially on Extropia, where litigation was private and an unwanted re-instantiation taking over a deceased person’s estate only for them to rise again was a legal nightmare and would cost a back-up insurance company a lot of dough; and at this point it had barely been three weeks since the incident.

After all is said and done, the Mad Monk requests that Roland (the Great) take a copy of ‘the book’ and a note for a governor in the Morning-star constellation (Roland (the Great) was heading to Venus next to meet with local officials and do a publicity stunt in the Venusian atmosphere). Roland (the Great) gladly accepted, took some fuel from the crew (replenishing what he lost) and made his exit, swearing to do his best to help clear the crew’s name.

At the last minute the AGI hacker and the Belter Techie stopped Roland (the Great) and asked him to take out a comms booster out past the Asteroid family, giving them back communication with Transhumanity at alarge again.

After Roland placed the booster, he sent them an urgent message, saying he had picked up a distant heat signature that was moving towards their location at fast acceleration, too fast for anything biological to be on board, and the only habitat in the objects trajectory path that it could be originating from was Lega, the HQ of 9 Lives…