Arion 1-10: Falling

"The course of true love never did run smooth." - William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Hollis Highport, 1105 Week 48

Cori is nearly well enough to be signed out of medbay even by the excessively cautious (or possibly jealous) Major Sheng, and knowing when Sheng will next drop in, she has meditated to elevate her psionics to the peak of their power. Directing Sheng's thoughts using the pretext of asking how Arion is, she uses her powers of persuasion and ability to read Sheng's emotions to find weak spots; jealousy of Officer Muhammed, and fear that Arion is ignoring her because he is not interested in her. Jealousy is not so useful to her, so she fans the flames of self-doubt in Sheng's mind, and the Major leaves more certain than ever that Arion finds her unattractive.

Hollis Badlands, 1105 Week 49

With Cori still in medbay, Karagoz tasks Sheng to assist Arion and Mr Osheen in returning to the surface to investigate the abandoned hut further.

Local dawn - light enough to see, but not yet in the full blaze of the sun - finds Arion gingerly nudging the ship closer to the hut, fifteen metres up.

"Move a bit further to port," Major Sheng says. "We should try not to put the hut in shade if we can avoid it." Whatever's inside might notice. Arion complies, and locks the autopilot into station-keeping before the three of them troop back into the cargo lock, right at the rear of the Dolphin, and lower the door flat. The wind is buffeting the wedge of the ship back and forth, and Arion realises he should have parked nose-on to the prevailing wind, rather than sideways, even if it did cast a shadow on the hut. All the same, everyone hooks themselves on to the ship, and Arion goes over the side, swinging in the wind. The others swing the rope to assist his dive, but even so he lands short and has to jog a few metres to the apparent wreckage. He clips his line to a convenient piece of debris and gets to work, with suggestions helpful and otherwise from the other two in his headset throughout.

The wreckage they noted last time as being a concealed hatch opens easily under persuasion from Arion's belt tool kit, and he finds a small room dug into the bedrock under the wreckage, with an obvious comms terminal and a small server. There is no sign of the maintenance robot they saw last time, and he wonders where it can have gone. All the gear looks like commercial off the shelf kit, so he brings out a portable memory unit and uses the built-in near-field communications to clone the server's drive. Time enough to decrypt it when they're back in a shirt-sleeve environment.

"Arion," Sheng calls, with the flat emotionless tone he has learned to associate with real danger, "Get out of there, now. There's a wave coming toward you through the scree. Might be a worm."

Arion has had enough sandworms to last him quite a while, so he hurriedly packs up and levers himself out through the hatch, stepping to the line and snapping it to his suit once more.

"Reel me in," he calls, and the others do so just as Big Jim emerges next to him. Mr Osheen lends his considerable strength to lift Arion clear of the gaping maw as he curls up his legs to present a smaller target. Sheng grabs his arm as soon it appears over the edge of the ramp, but miscalculates and starts to slip; Arion puts an arm around her to hold her steady, and she darts a glance at him.

"Easy," he says. "Nearly lost you there."

"Not a chance," she says firmly, daring to hope again.

GM Notes

Cori is being naughty, and lucky. She gets a success and a raise on boost/lower Psionics, then a success and a raise on her Psionics to cast empathy - and Major Sheng fails her Spirit roll to resist. The upshot of this is a +2 on her roll to Persuade Sheng to give up on Arion, and since that roll aces twice, she gets an 18 overall. Sheng resists with Spirit and gets an 11! Cori wins by 7, so is able to shift Sheng's original 11 (Friendly) down one band to (Co-Operative); she will be a little cooler towards Arion in future. Only after I finished rolling all this, feeling pleased with myself for thinking of it, did I realise Cori would be better off statistically by simply boosting her Persuasion to begin with. Oh well, as they say, we play to find out. Cori has long been established as ruthless, and while she usually prefers Arion's genuine affection, I think she would definitely be up for manipulating the other women.

On the surface, we have a complex dramatic task to deal with; eight tokens to collect in five rounds. I'll limit the NPCs to Support rolls, but leave skills open to make the narrative more interesting. I won't break the task down into separate steps though, as I don't want to restrict carrying over successes and raises between steps. The plan and outcomes, round by round:

• Round 1: Piloting to park the ship suitably. Sheng supports with Battle (fail, +0). Arion draws a club (-2) and rolls 5+0-2 = 3, failure, 0 tokens.
• Round 2: Athletics to rappel down to the hut. Sheng and Osheen support with Athletics (4, +1, and 11, +2, respectively; note that no single supporter can give more than +2 whatever they roll). Arion rolls 3+3=6, success, now up to 1 token.
• Round 3: Repair to get inside. Sheng and Osheen support with Common Knowledge (+0) and Notice (+0) respectively; Arion rolls 17 thanks to Aces, success and 3 raises, now up to 5 tokens.
• Round 4: Notice to find something useful. Sheng supports (+2) as does Osheen (+0), and Arion also has Alertness; he rolls 5+2+2=9, success and a raise, two tokens, now up to 7.
• Round 5: Athletics to get back up to the ship. Sheng (+0) and Osheen (+1) support; Arion rolls 10+1=11, success and a raise, now a total of 9 tokens so the mission is a success. At the end of round 5, Big Jim arrives and interrupts.

I was concerned that the NPC support might make it too easy, but what made the difference was the great roll in round 3. Without that, he would've failed.

Current status: Arion 6 VP, BBEG 2 VP.