Collins Does Solo RPG ‘The Wretched’

Music (Drifting – Chris Bissette)

Day 11, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

Today I ran a damage report check over every system and made a list. I wish I hadn’t. Basically everything has a problem, either big or small but ultimately nothing is working at 100%. I graded every issue from critical to minor inconvenience and then again from achievable right now to dry dock required. I then set to work on the critical and achievable. Most of the issues were caused by the creature as he tore through the ship and crew like a whirlwind. Scratch marks, gouges, or simple cuts mostly. I did find an interesting goo near one of the airvents. It was kinda clear in colour, sticky and viscous. It certainly is nothing that came from the ship, you know like pneumatic fluid, oil, water etc. so it must have come from the creature. I can only assume its saliva, blood or some sort of secretion like the ink from a squid. I think its inert, or at least it doesn’t react with the decking of the ship. I haven’t touched it so see what happens and I haven’t put my nose near it to smell it. At this point that seems unwise…

I managed to fix a few, re-connect a few cables, seal up bulkhead leaks with sheeting and even power up a door that hasn’t worked since the tornado roamed the ship. Sadly there was nothing amazing behind the door, it was just a storeroom and a rather general on at that. Still not found that mystical weapons locker with automated gun turrets and rocket launchers… shame, can live in hope.

Speaking of hope, I think that something is coming closer. The ships scanners keep giving me a ping. It is originating from off the starboard bow. It’s so exciting! The sensor can’t tell me what it is yet, it is too far away and it keeps losing the signal too. Nevermind, I’m still travelling forwards so if I give it a few days I’ll get closer to it and get a reading, assuming that it is stationary. I might open the blast shield in a day or two. Could be worth the risk of seeing the creature and opening a weakness in the ship, I’ll put my brown trousers on for that day. Mind you, now I think about it I’ve not heard him on the hull recently, curious.

Mission Day 238, Independent trade ship Errant Venture, Captain Terrick reporting.

Our comms officer caught a mayday call this afternoon.  It came through pretty clear thankfully. It goes as follows.

MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY, This is salvage ship ‘The Wretched’.

MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY, This is salvage ship ‘The Wretched’.

MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY, This is salvage ship ‘The Wretched’.

Class 4 starship recovery vessel with no drive power. Significant damage to several critical systems. 6 souls and 5 casualties on board. Last known location is 422.38.52 Oort Cloud travelling spinward along the Exocron boundary. Please help us, repeating, Over.

The mayday message is repeating every 30 seconds. I think if we divert we may be able to get to them within a reasonable time. That’ll be expensive however for both our vessel, crew and our employer. Time is money in our business and help doesn’t come free in the world of independent trading, I hope they have something valuable onboard to trade… It would be a terrible shame if we were unable to render aid in time… mind you if we are too late to help them there is always salvage rights…

Music (Empty Space – Chris Bissette)

Day 12, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

I found the diary of the good doctor today. It turns out that she kept a pretty good log of her time on the ship. There weren’t many injuries on the ship that needed tending too until the creature visited but then to be fair that didn’t really change the injuries as dead people don’t need bandaging up. There was a lot of commentary about medical papers, notes from pre-recorded lectures and so on. I skipped over most of it as I simply couldn’t understand it. Why they don’t use regular words for things in medicine I will never know. I understand they’re smarter than the average person but there is no need to use ancient dead languages for things now or needlessly long names for drugs like Paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin. Apparently it has some pretty alarming side effects!

There was some personal stuff in there too which gave an insight into the doctor as a person. Turns out they have a pet Labrador, a playful thing by all accounts who apparently has the ability to be overwhelmingly cute by coming and resting her head on your knee when she wants something like to go to the bathroom, have food or be played with. The doctor is clearly fond of this animal, there were a lot of photographs too. It’s sad to know that the dog will never see its owner again and that the doctor saw the waggly tail for the last time when we left port.

In other news the proximity alarm has been blaring out for most of the afternoon. At first I was excited! Raced to the bridge to have a look half expecting myself to be greeted with another ship coming to my aid and bringing ice cream too! Sadly, the scanners didn’t show me anything different than the last few days. A blip off the starboard bow but it wasn’t close enough to be triggering the proximity alarm, that alarm indicates imminent collision with objects or something directly in path of travel. On the scopes there is nothing to indicate why that would be.

I elected to open the blast shield to see what was occurring with the Mk1 ocular observation apparatus… my eyes. I saw the same clusters as a few days ago, the same planetoid spinning in and out of view but nothing that could trip the alarm. I can’t see what would be doing this so I added it to the list of problems and then deactivated the audio alarm. It’s still active but I simply can’t hear it. Problem solved. I broke out a nice cup of tea and stared out into space for a while, looking at the stars and basking in their wonder. It was relaxing.

Music (What is it? – Chris Bissette)

Day 12 Entry 2, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

Well it was bound to happen again wasn’t it. It’s the middle of ship’s night and I have woken in a sweat again. Another killer dream. This one is even more unsettling than the last.

I was out on the hull realigning the antenna and setting my trap for the creature and I could see him skulking around at the stern of the ship, just like I had in real life. All went as planned on the hull, I got back into the airlock and had a minor issue getting the door shut and room repressurised but nothing that was concerning. I walked into the dressing room to doff the EVA suit. I broke the seal on the helmet hearing the hiss and feeling the rush of stale shipboard air hitting my nostrils. I lifted the helmet, disconnected the lamp, comms, and HUD cables and then the lights started flickering. It was odd, like an incandescent bulb that is on the way out but the thing is, those sorts of bulbs aren’t installed on this vessel. Sure it’s an old ship but it’s not ancient.

Holding the helmet I turned it to put it on the shelf and that’s when something caught my eye in the glass visor, a dark humanoid shape. It rapidly got larger and took up most of the side of the visor, as that happened I felt a shadow come over my right shoulder. I barely had time to gasp when the EVA suit racking flew towards me. I felt a searing pain in my abdomen as the wall hooks hit me point first and my cheek caught fire with pain as the helmet shelf slammed into it. I tasted metal in my mouth.

After a second I lost my footing and hit the floor. Inexplicably I then was dragged across the floor and immediately felt the weightlessness of flight mixed with falling. Another huge impact, this time solidly across my back and shoulders.

When I realised what had happened I was looking down into my lap, I could see that my normally drab EVA suit was rapidly changing to a new vibrant strangely patterned luminous red. I kept looking around becoming aware that my peripheral vision was black. I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t directly in front of me. As I looked back down to the new pattern on my suit I could see something protruding out of it. It was strange, kind of bonelike, glossy and jet black. I followed it from my abdomen, out in front of me, up and then I saw it join to a shadow. I wasn’t able to make out the details of the shadow, but it was intimately familiar.

I saw a glossy crown hover in front of my face and then there was a lancing pain across face and a high pitched scream causing my ears to bleed.

That’s all I remember… I woke from the scream and I can still hear the echoes in my ears.

Day 13, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

Another day another broken system… the water recycler has started acting up. My morning cup of tea had a strange aroma to it. I’m sure if I had time and a committee of marketers or publicists I would be able to package it in a mildly fancy box, create a 6 second advert and then sell it to daft rich people as an exotic, super deluxe, top banana, ammonia smelling cup of tea rather than the reality of tea made with piss… I spent breakfast hoping that it was something as simple as the filters that needed changing. I know they don’t last forever and the system we have here is old tech. A better system is either evapsep or fresep but both of those take a lot of energy to run. The old school filters do the thing with the fraction of the power draw but the deterioration of the filters as the pours in the membrane fill up the overall effectiveness continually reduces. I had to go digging through Powell’s manuals to figure out where to swap the filters over. That bit only took 4 hours. Finding the damn filters took so much longer as I didn’t know where they were. Then installing it took all of 5 minutes. 4 clips, a gate, 2 clamps and that’s it. I did forget to shut off the running water just before the filters so I did get a bit wet doing it which was frustrating but not the end of the world.

As a side note, I’ve noticed that I’m cursing a lot more now. I have become more irritable at the incredibly minor things. Miss my mouth with food/drink, FFS. Drop a tool when working, FFS. Stub my toe or bang my head, FFS! It is probably the strain of the situation I find myself in now that is getting to me. I definitely could do with a break. 13 days living in a death trap with circling sharks is really tough. A nice get away somewhere warm with some cool, citrus, mint and sugar spirit concoctions. Oh, and only humans allowed… no creepy creatures… they can all fuck off.

Day 13 Entry 2, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

Oh for fucks sake! Now something else has broken. Something pretty important to convenience. The artificial gravity projector has crapped out on me… right in the middle of dinner. The first I knew of it my tummy felt slightly weird and I was hit in the face by a bunch of gravity defying peas that had flown off my fork in intriguing slow motion.

So now me and my gravy-stained shirt have spent all evening trying to work our way to the bowels of the ship to try and fix the issue. It was easier said than done, the corridors on this ship don’t have handholds to monkey crawl hand over fist on. Sure they’re not exactly smooth but it’s not like the exterior of the ship where handholds are deliberately installed with tether anchor points as a backup for when your mag boots fail. On the way through the corridors most things were where I left them, but every time I moved past something or touched something it would move and then not settle, just bounce around. I’m going to have a lot of cleaning to do tomorrow when I can be bothered.

Anyway, I got down there and started running checks on the system. The main things all seemed to be working well. The gauge dials were gauging, the lights were lighting, the knobs all turned… just the make everything stay on the ground bit wasn’t doing the staying on the ground thing. It got to the point that I ditched to FAQ guide and reverted to button mashing and percussive maintenance.

I don’t know why it happened but I now know I have one hell of a pain in my elbow. Randomly gravity abruptly returned and the angle I was floating at led me to landing elbow first on the grating floor which is surprisingly sharp for a mostly flat surface. At first it was funny but now the pain is getting beyond uncomfortable and a muscle in my arm has swollen in a really weird way. I still have reasonably good use of it but I certainly will need to keep an eye on it for the next day or two.

Music (Drifting – Chris Bissette)

Day 14, salvage ship The Wretched, Flight Engineer Collins Reporting.

Today I took a work light day. I have a painful elbow afterall so couldn’t do much manual labour like lifting and shifting. So obviously I decided to tidy up everything that fell over, floated away and generally made a mess when the gravity failed yesterday. Yeah I know, pretty stupid but it is not a serious injury and the doctor has some wonderful drugs in the infirmary pharmacy cupboard to help with pain and swelling.

I knocked it on the head at about lunch time and treated myself to a bacon sandwich. It was banging. I then turned to finalising the second hiding hole.

So I have one in the captain’s ready room and a second one towards the rear of the cargobay. Whilst searching for a few other things I found a pretty cool room that has a lockable door and an escape route under the flooring. It’s some kind of maintenance access leading back into the cargobay, I think it’s so vehicle maintenance can be done should we be carrying heavy goods wagons etc. Either way it seems to make sense to me to have a few ways in/out of a hiding place just incase one access route is blocked.

I packed in there some sleeping gear, crude blunt force trauma weapons, some tools, food and a first aid kit, just some basics. I’ll make it a bit more homely in due course but I’m not in a rush to do it today, the basics are enough for now. I spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out on the bridge staring out at the stars again. And trying to figure out what that occasional sensor ping is.

Music (What is it? – Chris Bissette)

Mission Day 243, Independent trade ship Errant Venture, Captain Terrick reporting.

We have been slowing tracking towards the MayDay call. It is moving. We were heading directly to it’s reported last known position but now we’ve noticed that it has been slowly moving each time it broadcasts. That means that we have now basically been going in a wide arc to reach it. That’s frustrating. It uses up too much fuel, fuel has cost, those costs are not insignificant. The price of their rescue increases all the time the muck us around like this. Eventually we will end up arriving behind them which should make it easier for us to dock, we can match their speed and be travelling in the same direction already so at least that’s not going to be inefficient.

Woah, wait, what was that?!

…

…

…

Conn reports a massive light pulse off the port bow, blue in colour, that’s odd. We’ll replay the sighting and parse it through the sensors to see what they make of it. Looks like something went bang though, and in a big way too.