flotsam and jetsam for tabletop games, by quadra.
After stopping to refuel at the remote mining station Ypsilon-14, the crew gets caught up in some local trouble involving missing miners, a reclusive researcher, and a mysterious presence…
Active Crew: 
02BZ 
Sasha Denisovich 
J. 
Can Rashid
The once-quiet miner Kantaro leaps at his coworker Jerome, furiously spitting yellow froth.
Sasha fails his body save and gets infected.
Jerome dodges out of the way and the crew try to step in. Sasha punches him in the gut, but Kantaro, doubling over, sprays yellow goo all over his chest and Sasha falls to the ground. William Henry Harrison clocks Kantaro in the face with a metal fist, knocking him to the deck. His metal chassis gets sprayed with goo as well, but it has no effect on him.
The crew decides to put Kantaro in an isolation tank aboard their ship, the Grasshopper, since they don’t want to contaminate a cryopod. Besides, since the iso tanks were built for involuntary psionic testing, they have substantial restraints built into them. WHH restrains Kantaro, locks him in the pod, and turns on its vitals monitoring equipment.
Hardcastle’s player was out this session, but he’s still on the ship so I let the players use him as a (limited) resource.
The only thing WHH can glean from the readout is that Kantaro seems to be in perfect health, but he relays the feed to Hardcastle via the ship’s network for monitoring (Hardcastle is still laid up in bed with a bad case of cryosickness, but he can monitor some medical data).
Dana, the Solarian miner, asks to help the crew, saying she knows the layout of the station and she doesn’t just want to sit and wait to die. They give her a pistol and she joins them as they head over to the station terminal in the work area. Seeing this, Can says she wants a gun too. J is wary of giving a teenager an SMG so she gives her a foam gun instead. Can accepts it, sulking.
On the text-interface terminal, J checks the station status, pulls up a map of the station, and checks the station schedule. With some hacking help from WHH, they wipe the record of their own ship’s arrival — just in case. She then locks the Dock 1 airlock (leading to the scientist’s ship RSV The Heracles) and the airlock in the mineshaft that leads to the mine, seeking to shut down entry and exit routes and secure the area.
Checking more systems, she sees:
> STATUS
SYSTEMS CHECK ...
WARNING: AIR FILTERS LAST REPLACED 455 DAYS AGO (255 DAYS PAST RECOMMENDATION)
WARNING: SHOWER 5 OUT OF ORDER AS OF 1 DAY AGO
WARNING: MINESHAFT ELEVATOR LAST MAINTAINED 455 DAYS AGO (255 DAYS PAST RECOMMENDATION)
WARNING: AIRFLOW 82% (SUBOPTIMAL: REPLACE FILTERS AND CHECK VENTS FOR BLOCKAGES)
ALL SYSTEMS WITHIN ACCEPTABLE OPERATING CONDITIONS
BACK <The crew notes that they should check the broken shower and possibly the vents. J looks at shower status specifically and sees:
> SHOWERS
SHOWER 1 [OFF]
SHOWER 2 [ON]
SHOWER 3 [OFF]
SHOWER 4 [OFF]
SHOWER 5 [OFF]
BACK <Shower 2 is on right now — someone may be in there, unaware of what’s happening. Another sign that they should check the showers. As they start heading that way, WHH turns on his eyes’ infrared mode, and Can puts on her infra goggles. They cautiously creep through the living quarters, where everything is deathly quiet except for the faint buzzing of soft music, and approach the showers.
Inside, they see that the shower stall nearest them has been ripped apart, the shower head dangling limply and the control panel torn from the wall. Steam is rising from the second-to-last shower stall in the room, filling the end of the room with a soft haze. WHH and Can see a human form with their infrared, washing itself in the stall.
At this point, as if by divine providence, Sasha’s player’s computer crashed and his image froze on our video call. He rejoined just as the scene was ending.
Sasha, however, stands transfixed in terror at the entrance to the room, afraid to get any closer to the water.
Not noticing Sasha’s hesitation, J calls out to the person in the shower, and a woman pokes her head out and asks what they want. They tell her about the situation — she knew about Mike being missing, but missed all the subsequent developments. She looks to her companions Dana and Jerome, who nod solemnly. Rosa has disappeared, and Kantaro appeared to have gone rabid and had to be restrained.
She quickly towels off and slips into a jumpsuit, introducing herself as Morgan and following them back towards the docking bay. As she walks by Sasha, her hair still dripping wet, he flinches and jumps back. “The fuck’s your problem, bud?” He keeps his distance and doesn’t reply.
Moving back through the living quarters, WHH scans the room in infrared and sees a large humanoid shape with very long limbs and long, pointed fingers loping towards them, its huge head waving back and forth. WHH immediately lowers his SMG and fires. The first spray of bullets goes wide. The second hits its mark, but barely slows the thing down.
They all fire with disadvantage.
To the rest of the crew, it looks like WHH is just shooting randomly into the walls. WHH calls out that something is coming as he fires, and the rest try and follow suit, but nobody connects.
Suddenly blood sprays from Jerome’s chest as an invisible claw slashes across it. He falls to the floor in surprise and pain, clutche his chest and starts kicking away backwards and cursing.
J shoots at the invisible creature as best she can while backing away towards the showers and directing Morgan to turn them on — she suspects it doesn’t like water and they may be able to take refuge in there.
Can, who can see it with her infrared goggles, shoots her foam gun at it. As the foam quick-hardens, she sees it struggling to lift its feet from the floor. It’s stuck! A second spray to the creature’s torso and arms reveal to the others a foamy, lumpy approximation of its form as it struggles to free itself.
A crit fail for Sasha here.
Sasha, seeing the foamy forms, sprays it with his SMG, but only manages to shred the foam at the creature’s feet, accidentally setting it free!
The foam-encrusted creature lunges at Jerome, still prone on the ground. The crew sees Jerome’s legs lift up and disappear into thin air in great bloody gulps. Jerome screams uncontrollably. As everyone looks on in terror, the rest of him, disappears into nothingness, and all is silent.
From the Panic table.
Reeling in horror, Sasha’s heart contracts with a stabbing pain. He keels over, clutching at his chest. He’s having a heart attack.
A crit success from J.
J is the first to recover her wits and shoots again. This time her aim is true, and the creature reels in agony as its left arm seems to get torn apart by the spray of bullets. The creature lopes back and jumps through the ceiling tiles and away from the party, its arm flopping limply after it.
Lost a Hit and some Body Save points.
The crew grabs Sasha and rushes him to the medic tent in the work area. Can tries to administer blood thinners to him, but she can’t seem to stabilize him. Dana runs to get Sunny, who arrives just as Sasha is blacking out and manages to stabilize him — but he’s going to need surgery. They decide to rush him to the ship and get him in cryo before anything else can happen.
Arriving on the ship, they see a terminal light up. It’s Sonia, the psychic teenage test subject who has merged with their ship:
> yo guys
> been going over the data w the doc
> on the dude u put in the iso tank
> its fuckin weird he was like in amazing health
> like he was hurt when u put him in
> but a lil while later he was ok
> and now uhhhhhhhhhh
> you should just look :/Sasha heals to full, and regains lost Body Save points.
As they read this, Sasha’s eyes snap open and he gasps for breath. The pain in his chest is receding! He jumps up out of the stretcher. He feels great! Better than ever!
Everyone is deeply disconcerted by this. Can makes a Solarian warding sign and touches the Sol mark on her forehead.
J says “stay put” and ducks over to the cargo bay to check the isolation tank. Nobody is inside. Instead, streaks of yellow yoo line the parts of the tank where Kantaro was, and goo drips from the still-shut restraints. Several gallons of the yellow slime have accumulated at the bottom of the tank.
“Put Sasha in cryo! Right now!” J shouts.
To be continued…
