Session started at 6:56 pm on 05/08/2007
Attending players: Sarah, Michael, Ben, and Eva
Presiding GM: Aaron
The elevator ride down to the central dome is disturbingly informational. We get a rather long pre-recorded schpeal about the makeup of the domes and the general workings of the facility.
"The GaeaTech Gamma facility is an underwater kelp farming plant. It's made up of seven smaller domes and one larger central dome...."
The floating airstrip and doc for cargo ships sits on the surface and is connected to the central dome via the elevator. The seven smaller domes radiate around the central dome like a wheel. The actual farming is done in the triangular spaces between the domes. Each of the spaces is about 20 to 30 hecktares.
There's one dark skinned human male ridding the elevator down with is. His name plate says Druge and he introduces himself as Danel Druge. He's apparently come up from down in the domes to handle our orientation. We introduce ourselves with our cover names.
Dan, as he asks us to call him, seems okay. He talks up the facility a bit and chats with us about our jobs to be. I really hope they're not lying about getting along with the local merrow or my job is going to be very unpleasant.
He introduces us to Parique Holmes, the chief of the facility; Martha Colins, a female orc, who's going to be Yorick and my's boss. There's also a female dwarf who's going to be Ajax's boss. I didn't quite catch her name.
And then there's the chief medical officer, Dr. Audre Rashmison. I only just manage to keep myself straight faced. It's the doctor. I can't tell if she's surprised to see us or not. She appears to have gotten better at lying since her trip to Boston.
We get dragged off to see our quarters. I wander how much of the space is bugged or otherwise watched. I'm not looking forward to trying to find a way to talk to the doctor.
We have to walk out to the radial dome C to our quarters. The domes are connected by huge clear plastic tubes with emergency pressure lock doors on either end of them. On one level, the view is neat. On another, uh, it's a little creepy. There's a lot of waving kelp and a myriad of strange fish out there.
("I got a cup. It has penguins on it."
~ Michael
"Penguins aren't fish."
~ Ben
"Only technically."
~ Michael)The room isn't too bad. The beds are a row of bunks. I'm not going to be spending a lot of time in here, I hope. Ajax is trying to get a hold of the doctor. She doesn't seem to want to talk to us via electronics. Ajax walks out to the med bay. He stays linked up to us electronically.
According to the doctor, there was some trouble during her visit to Boston. Sader Crup knows she's alive now. They know she's down here so she doesn't want to let them monitor too much communication.
The family friend she was going to visit was apparently already in deep shit because of the extraction. He had a team getting him out and they agreed to get her out as well in return for a favor. Working here is the favor. She also says that Aztechnology placed her here. Uh, that's exciting. Shit.
She was just supposed to work here and tell them about anything strange. She unfortunately left the kid with them. That can't be good, but at this point I don't see how we could do anything about it.
Ajax says he hasn't been able to see any security monitors in the facility so far, so he takes the chance and tells the doctor a little bit about our mission. He gives her a very small sample of the gel to analyze. We don't tell her right away what the Johnson said it was supposed to be.
The doctor takes a look at the gel with her lab equipment. She says it is a retrovirus mean to alter kelp. She's going to need some kelp samples to do further analysis. That should wait for a day or two since we don't even know if the corporate inspection team is here yet.
We head off to eat lunch. The dining hall is pretty relaxed. Most of the people seem nice enough. Ajax goes off to hobnob while Yorick and I sit off at a quiet table. A group of about a dozen people come to our table. They approach us and ask if they can sit with us. They've all got AR name tags identifying them as being from various mega-corps. The guy who addressed us directly is Tom Bayer.
(Aaron listed a whole bunch of names/corp names here but I was not writing fast enough to take them down.)
So I guess these are the inspectors then. We introduce ourselves and let them know that we are just starting work here. We be friendly. Yorick manages to talk out of them that they are leaving tomorrow evening. We pick up our jumpsuits on the walk back to our quarters after lunch.
We let Ajax know about the inspection team once we're back in our room alone.
The next day, as bright and early as you can get without a visible sun, Yorick and I report to be fitted for the underwater diving suits.
We do a couple of runs out in the kelp to get acquainted with the suits and the area. Our guide points out some big red circles on our AR display and warns us not to walk in them. The circles mark the explosive bolts for releasing parts of the dome from the ground in an emergency. Fun. We are also supposed to leave merrow alone and not make eye contact. Okay. I wasn't planning on running up and hugging them, so that should be no problem.
The folks back in the domes want us to contact them constantly since you can't see very far out in the kelp. Our main job is to keep the kelp clean and untangled. We also need to report any diseases or blemishes on the kelp. If we get put on harvester duty we need to make sure the openings the harvester drones use don't get clogged and watch out for the harvester drones themselves. Their description suggests this is mostly a crushing hazard if the drones fail to detect/identify us properly. Experience says I should take any automated vehicle seriously, so no problem there.
(Ajax is getting introduced to his computer techie job. I didn't pay a lot of attention.)
Ajax goes off on a jaunt around the domes while Yorick and I are eating lunch. He apparently has found the pump we need to put the stuff in. He also snagged some kelp. He drops it off with the doctor before rejoining us.
("Kelp is some sort of creepy sea fern."
~ Eva, referring to kelp's strange reproductive practices)They serve a lot of sea food around here. I suppose that shouldn't come as a surprise. It's the first time I've had properly fresh fish in years.
In the evening the doctor is among the group that bids the inspection team farewell. She reports that they have all piled off into the elevator. Apparently the ride up is about a day and a half, so we'd better wait a couple more days before we do our funny business.
The work is a bit boring but not too bad. Once we are pretty sure the inspection team is off the place, we formulate our daring plan. During dinner Yorick is going to be sneaking over to the pump to insert the gel. Meanwhile I'll eat dinner and Ajax will be in our room starting work on hacking the node. His goal is to send some messages which will get us all recalled to the mainland. This includes the doctor. Hopefully whoever placed her here will not object violently.
(The node looks like an underwater garden of eden, complete with a kelpy tree of knowledge. The security is present but not particularly alert. The communications uplink is in the central node. There's also a rather large massively multiplayer game running, as well as a bunch of other nodes which link off to the other technical parts of the facility.)
(The doctor is woken by a patent in the middle of the night. He's complaining of stomach cramps and takes a turn much for the worse while he's talking to her. The doctor is pretty sure that the guy is suffering from some form of UGE. She smacks him with a tranq patch and calls Lume.)
I get a call in the middle of the night. I was up reading anyway so I answer right away. It's the doctor. She's babbling something about people who just ate being sick and turning into not themselves. I'm trying to get her to slow down and tell me what's going on, when her end of the call suddenly devolves into screaming and gurgling.
Shit.
End of Session