Session 3 Summary
The team was heading to the elevators, just another day, moving through the crowds on level 25 towards the sectors central lifts. As they jostled their way onto the lift, they hear from behind them, “Zounds! I haven't seen a Tardigrada in ages!”. Quickly turning, Dwabit is not able to see who said it as the lift doors closed and the lift started moving down towards level 17. Dwabit quickly shoved through the crowd on the lift to the elevator panel and triggered hit all the level buttons, hoping it to get it to stop on the next floor so he could catch the next elevator up to 25 to try to find whoever said that. Scout and Deli followed him and tried to calm him down.
Deli reveals that she captured a picture of the man with one of her cameras, and that she would do a search to find him on the station. They head to her apartment to do the search. She discovers that his name is Avercombe Willinegsworth. He came to Port Rails a week prior on a tourist visa and had returned to his home in Orion on Gaia. Dwabit left and Scout crashes on the couch.
Dwabit sends a message that he wants to meet Avercombe W. to find out where he met a Tardigrada before. He also sends purchase a coffee basket and gets it delivered to Deli, along with 2 T-73 Dynaflux Power Coil Regulators. Dwabit gets a reply back from Avercombe that he would be happy to meet and gives Dwabit his address in a not-great part of town. He struggles to figure out how to get down to the planet quickly; the trip down on the elevator takes over a day. He knows a ship can get down there in well under an hour.
Each crew member receives a message from Brandy, their shift manager: “You have a priority mission today, meet me and Captain Martinez in the briefing room.”
Dwabit calls in for personal time off, family emergency, Scout and Deli head into the meeting. They learn about their next, “High Priority” mission, which seems to piss off Brandy and makes Captain Martinez very smug. The learn that the mission is to move the scientific outpost’s ship The Blue Eagle from where it has crashed on Falaoran in the Clump system back to the shipyard in Torrin. Apparently the scientist whose ship crashed has some pull with somebody.
They have a couple of hours before they must leave.
Deli and Scout reach out to Dwabit about the mission and learn he wants to go down to Gaia, has never been there. They smuggle Dwabit into their ship, the NED Tugboat, (he is on PTO). Dwabit flies it down directly to Avercombe’s neighborhood in Orion, lands in a parking lot. They ring A.W.s bell and he invites them in, reveals that 25 or 30 years ago, he was at a dig on Torrin, a series of underground tunnels had been discovered; dating of materials found in the tunnels indicated it was pre-historic, as far as Torrin’s history is concerned. (Circa 5-10k years prior to current time.) In a chamber at the other end of the maze of tunnels, there was an artifact he had been pulled in to examine. He must have triggered a trap, because he was unconscious for some time. When he awoke he was in a different place. He now thinks it was maybe a lucid dream, or he received some sort of communication. He spent several hours there, interacting with many different non-human beings, including Tardigrada, some short cat-like beings, large lobster beings, et cetera. There were no humans in the group he had met. The Tardigrada was named Appius, (Dwabit’s best friend and cousin.) The place he had appeared in was another archaelogical dig, similar to the one he had been examining on Torrin. When he awoke, he was in a hospital on Torrin.
From the point of view of the archaelogists on Torrin, the artifact had exploded and threw him across the chamber, knocking him out. They told him the chamber collapsed and the artifact must have been destroyed. He had been unconscious for three weeks, but he had surely been in the other place no longer five or six hours. He never returned to the dig site.
Avercombe told the team that he would arrange a meeting on the site and would get back to them.
The crew is on the NED Tugboat on their way back to Port Rails from Gaia.