Subject: DunDraCon part 4 of 4 Date: Tue, 30 May 95 11:35:25 -0700 From: Liralen Li ----- Arrival at Verrick ----- First thing with the Albedo game was picking characters. Because of a short story that Mark once sent me, I decided to play a Rat while Mark found a Fox he wanted to play. Carl picked a Weasel and a guy we didn't know from before picked a Racoon to play. Hubert then assigned me as captain of the ship. I'm still not sure why he did that other than, perhaps, to make sure that I stayed involved in the game. Carl can sometimes be a really dominating player, which he also knows, so perhaps Hubert was giving me a reason to not get completely overwhelmed by Carl. As it was, though, it made for an interesting team dynamic, 'cause my captain was the 'quiet one' and let Carl go and get into all the trouble he wanted to get into while she held up the diplomatic end of the things and gave the dignified face on everything. That was kinda interesting, 'cause Carl would come up with all the cool ideas, defer them to me and then I'd just let him do 'em, on the most part. I did some leading, but mostly just stayed out of the way. It was a lot of fun just sitting back, up against Mark and watching Carl go and kinda surfing in his wake. That was cool. It's always fun to watch Carl play full out. The Racoon also took the lead occassionally with some of the events, and Mark only took a single lead at the end of the game that helped crack the case, as it turned out. It was a really cool game... started out with a patrol going out to the planet of Verrick and we arrived safetly and went to a diplomatic dinner that was thrown in the honor of out arrival. We were mostly just a customs vehicle, there to make sure that smuggling wasn't going on and to crack down on the folks that did do it. Lots of interesting, small pointers during the party, with lots of interesting character information as to the people on the planet. Verrick, the planet, was relatively uninteresting... Hubert did a really good job of setting up most of the people. Carl went and got involved with a lovely fox lady that had a jealous suitor and we had a lot of fun with the insults Carl was trading with the suitor and all kinds of fun things that happened with the... uhm... seduction that Carl was putting on. That was fun. I did the boring diplomatic thing and got introduced to the local Governor and found him to be a big bear with a passion for rock climbing and absolutely no head or care for the business of running his city or country or whatever... and he had a little tiny mouse of an assistant that was very polite and very, very correct. There were also rabbits at the party. In Albedo, the rabbits are the 'bad guys' who have gone off and made their own systems and there is some eminity between the rest of the universe and the rabbits. Mostly 'cause the ILR was pretty xenophobic and kicking out anyone that wasn't a rabbit. Anyway... so there was also a bunch of officers of the Independent Lapine Republic that Carl got in some good insults with. There was also some interaction with some other folks as well, including an accountant and some smaller folks that helped run the governorship. We went back to our ship and had some repairs made, and rotated crew like normal for shore leave and all that. We also did some normal patrolling, and some hasselling of the local trade ships. There were some mutterings about how 'the *last* crew didn't do all this' and some alarm and mutterings about how we were being sticklers for things the other crew hadn't been sticklers for. Which was all to the good as far as we were concerned. We were doing our jobs. Then we got telemetry information on a *BIG* old ship that was headed into the system and it looked like the ship wasn't slowing down as it came into the system. With the given telemetry it was headed right into the sun. We were the only ship that could get to it in time. So the four of us headed out, full blast. Both Carl and I were the navegators for the ship, and I failed miserably on plotting our course, but Carl did beautifully when I had him double check my calculations. So, that worked... we lined up smoothly with the Big Ship and found that it was a very, very old rabbit style freighter that was rough made for living in and all it's drives messed were up. There was no power to the ship. When we tried to dock, Hubert did a great job of telling us just how nonfunctional the airlocks were and just how terrible the maintinance there was. We used one of our maintence robots to open the airlock and explore before we went in. The parts of the ship we saw were completely unmaintanced, and there was horrible fungus growing everywhere, kinda indicative of no cleaning going on and no good air cycling or reclaimation of the water in the air. We eventually found some controls. There were no computer controls still on, there was nearly no energy in the systems. It was basically supposed to be a dead ship... but as we explored further, we found one completely emaciated rabbit in the control room, who looked half dead of starvation, along with a bunch of dead rabbits as well. With further exploration and use of the sensors that we had, we found a population of several tens of thousands of rabbits in the generational ship. There was absolutely NO way we would be able to get them off the ship before it hit the sun, given it's present trajectory. Slowly we went further into the ship, finding dead and dying rabbits everywhere. There was an entire cylinder that was *filled* with a web of hammocks that were filled with rabbits and their airborn wastes. No power, no gravity. It was pretty horrifying. If I were to do a writeup, my character basically freaked out at this point and just couldn't deal with the sheer magnitude of the misery in there. Along the cylinder was a place where they had a makeshift hospital... and in the hospital was one of the engineers for the ship... There was a possibility of bringing the power back to the ship, of getting controls again, with the tools and power that we had brought with us. It included our medical supplies to make the necessary personnel better, and included our power supply to jumpstart their engines. We had four days. So we immediately got to work with what we could do. It was slow work, long hours and all the small changes that we could do didn't really seem to make that much of a difference. It was such a huge task. And we had to keep our ship open to their ship in order to do all the connections for power and other things. A web of cables pretty much connected the two ships through the locks. As much as we hated the contamination, there was no other way to do it quickly. We also organized the rabbits to clean up the areas, to put their dead out into space and make ready for when they did have power again. Slowly but surely things improved and as the engineers came back on line with food and medical attention, we made faster and faster gains. Then one evening I found stuff in my cabin had been moved, and there were fungus smears here and there. And we found a young girl rabbit hidden away in one of the cabins... Hard as it was we had to throw her out and back into the generational ship. Period. Which didn't make me feel good at being captain, but it was necessary. If one of them would come on, the rest would want to. Anyway... we did manage to fix the computer control systems, and kick start the power plants just in time and bring the ship out of orbit to the sun... and we *did* notify all the rabbits before gravity came back. And we escorted them back to Verrick, where most of the rabbits asked for refuge status from the Terrible Rabbit State... 'cause most of them were political escapees. Hurrah! Hurrah! Back to routine stuff. We stop a couple more ships. Some Way Beyond the Call of Duty Harrassment of Ensigns leads to more clues. There are all kinds of small signs that someone around the government in Verrick is trying to allow smuggling into the planet. That someone is being paid big bucks for the priviledge and right. Then we find out that one of them has custom papers that are signed by the mole accountant guy. With that we have something concrete. We triumphantly bring that back to base with us and then find out that he was shot. Killed dead with a bullet through the head. We ask and find out that the caliber of the bullet was a small one, that there were no signs of struggle, when he was killed and that he was killed in his office, at his desk. Cool. A mystery. We putz about a bit more and then go and inspect another ship. Get put through the ringer, so we know we probably have the right ship. Do some more ensign terrorizing and we hit The Jackpot. Great, Big Nasty Gun Parts, stuff that could proably take apart a planet... really, really nasty stuff. And the papers they have are signed by the accountant, on the day he died, but with a time stamp of *after* he died... which means that someone would have had to have forged the signature, which is computer based. They would have had had to have access to the system and to the accountant's files. The only one that matched that description was the mouse assistant... We go to her office, and confront her with the rather circumstantial evidence. That the gun was of a caliber that could have been used on the mole, that she didn't have an alibi for that time, and a number of other small things. No luck. So we go into her personal quarters. Okay... we break in. And she has Art. Not just art, but *Art*... a piece that makes me awestruck with its rareness, something that normally can't even be bought for love or money, but might be bought for a Very, Very, Very large amount of MONEY... we look around some more and she's very precise, very neat. We then set our computer expert at her personal terminal... and the password for her accounts is the name of the Artist. And it turns out that she's not only getting the large amounts for the smuggling, but also siphoning funds from the rabbit refugees. We get copies of the data. We file one away for safe keeping, but the data wouldn't be admissible in court as we broke in without a warrent to find it. We bring the data over to the Mouse's office again, and confront her with it. She still doesn't break. That's when Mark said, "Let's put her in the chair of the mole, where he was killed." So we troop her to the next office over, where the blood is still on the chair and floor and desk, and put her in the chair and she breaks beautifully, spills everything into a recorder... about hos she's the real power behind the governer and why we had to come in and mess this all up and... how she had to kill the accountant guy 'cause he was going to give it all up and away to us and... Hurrah!! ----- End of Rendevous at Verrick ----- After the game Hubert and Carl had to run off to other games, after a very brief dinner at the really inexpensive snack bar. Mark and I then went up to our room and basically did quite a few things that we'd been thinking and talking of doing for a long time, stuff that John and I had talked over and figured out would be okay with him as well. A lot of it, though, was finally being able to just hold each other and *talk*, full out, in real time, with full band communication, being able to use and see and touch body language and communicate ideas and emotions with full capability. No longer limited to just the textual stream that we'd been exchanging for so long. It was also fun being able to talk over with Mark what he'd thought of the games. He liked both Hubert and Carl's running styles and had enjoyed himself, even if he hadn't had to stretch himself in the games. One of the things where he and I are alike is that if other people are leading and there isn't any need for someone to be in charge, we'll just ride the waves of the game. No need to make more. It's only when there is an obvious 'something that has to be done' that has to have someone filling in and no one else sees it do we go ahead and act and can act decisively. We didn't get to sleep until 3 or 4 in the morning, and Mark had to leave around 11 to ride the shuttle to get to his plane on time. We slept, and got up and kinda had breakfast with Carl, and then I saw Mark off on his shuttle and then wandered back into the Con to find Hubert at another game and Carl just wandering about. I wandered with Carl, still kinda dazed from lack of sleep and following the yearly ritual of just dying on the last day of the Con. Didn't do much that was useful, but did get into some really interesting gaming conversations. Lots of material from various long-term running games, including talking with several people I'd met all the years before. That was a lot of fun, just to touch bases again and learn people again. Carl eventually got both Hubert and I and brought us to the airport again, and Hubert and i had our usual fun time at the airport, gettinga little something to drink and then talking like crazy, exchanging updates as to what we were writing and when and Hubert gave me a copy of the Furry mystery that he'd been writing, which was quite good to read. I hope he finds a publisher for that. Then the flight home to John and Fezzik at the airport, yum... and a couple of lovely, furry hugs back into Reality... ----- End of text -----