Asteroids and Athletes Ch. 08

It had been nearly a half hour of Zarasti trying to contact someone. Heidi asked where the ruins were and if they were near enough that she could rent a vehicle to get there quickly? Cesar said that if she left immediately she might make it. Heidi asked to rent a vehicle with a communicator so she could talk and drive at the same time. She went to a place to rent and tried to rush the rental. Cesar asked her to roll luck again. She swore when she rolled above her luck. Cesar said the rental person got very suspicious when she was trying to rush so much, so they refused to rent to Zarasti. Heidi looked defeated. She went back to get a cheap hotel. And she decided to work on hacking like she had asked before. She wanted to spend the whole day to get the bonus. Then she rolled another almost critical failure (ninety-eight)! Cesar told her that because of the margin of failure, the file she had been trying to hack was deleted. Heidi swore and stood up from the table. I looked around and everyone seemed shocked. Cesar got up just as she sat back down. He asked her if everything was ok? She assured him that she was alright, just frustrated at her bad luck. That file was the key to getting back at her rival, and now it was gone. Maira asked if she wanted to use an extra set of dice that she had brought. Heidi agreed, despite professing that she was not superstitious.

She was afraid of a paradox so she decided to have Zarasti wait until the time she knew that Zarasti's past self would have time traveled again. Then she went to the expensive hotel and explained the whole situation to the adventuring party. Zarasti didn't want to use the stopwatch again because it didn't seem like it was feasible to change anything. We all agreed to keep the stopwatch, but to only use it if there was a very good reason.

Justin's character tried to grab the device from Zarasti to use it, and rolled successfully enough to take it but the device wouldn't activate again. It just flashed red. His character Xoragol began to cry. He wanted to try and save Fanvo, regardless of the consequences, but the device wouldn't cooperate. It was a sad moment. Xoragol finally gave it back and agreed not to use it again without asking.

We went to sleep in the hotel and the next morning we took the artifacts to Senyaava to get the money. He thanked us and said that because of our reputation he was wondering if we wanted to help any further. There was a group of pirates that had assaulted a settlement near the magnetic north pole of the planet and also a research station that had reports of what might be another geosaur. He asked if we'd be interested in either job. Each would be a significant dollar reward, with the research station being ten thousand credits and the pirates being seven thousand. Grita and the others asked for some time to think about it. So we took the money he had given us to the local gunsmith and put in the request for personalized weapons like we had talked about last week. We had enough from the artifacts to pay for everything.

Senyaava let us stay in the hotel again that night. I talked with Grita about the choices of jobs. I felt the pirate job would be more fun and she agreed. She thought we just needed some normal combat to get over this funk we had been in. It had been weeks since we'd seen a battle mat. The next morning we tried to convince the others to fight pirates, but they really wanted to go to the research station. Especially Xoragol. They thought blowing up a geosaur would do Fanvo proud. But we weren't able to convince them, especially since we no longer had anyone that was good with explosives.

We went to Senyaava and told him our answer. He gave us the coordinates and we immediately flew off towards the settlement where the pirates were meant to be. Before we got there, we came across a ship that had crashed a mile or two away. Inside the ship was only one survivor. Evans's new character!

The character was an Airudian just like Heidi's character Zarasti, so he would be using they/them pronouns. Evan described the new character Ostaga as pale with grayish blue skin and large eyes like the typical area 51 aliens. They wore a long vibro-sword on one hip and a heavy pistol on the other with a belt of small tools. They were pretty hurt though, starting out with 5 damage from the crash. Ostaga took a few moments to say goodbye to his (dead) crew and gather any wreckage that could be useful. They explained that they were going after the pirate reward too, but were crash landed nearly four days ago. Ostaga had been caught underneath the wreckage of the ship called Whisper. They were starving, only barely surviving by drinking rain water. Ostaga searched the wreckage with the others and found several rations and a couple destroyed bots that could be used for parts. They found a few standard rifles, and some ammo that could be used for the Red Nova ship. Ostaga explained they were blasted down by the pirates' heavy anti-aircraft guns. They recommended going by foot, but wanted a day to recover from being so weak from the crash and starvation.

We agreed. We kept the Red Nova next to the crashed Whisper and thought about scouting ahead while Ostaga rested. Cesar said that was a good time to stop for the night. He also reminded everyone that next week was Spring break and we wouldn't have a game then.