Traveller: Session 42

 

This session was run on September 28, 2023.

 

044-1118

 

This session began right after Ulrich confined the travellers to their quarters aboard the Ine Givar ship. They decided to do a quick search of the room. The room was long, with metal beds bolted to the floor and lockers along one wall. Its original purpose was clearly a bunk room. Like everything else they had seen so far aboard the ship, the beds were slightly too long for a human. They searched the lockers and found a strange skeleton in one. The skeleton had three legs, was about seven and a half feet tall, and its knees bent the opposite way of a humans. Its skull was slightly elongated in front, leading the travellers to believe it may have had a snout. They also noticed that there were scratches on the inside of the locker door. Had it been locked inside? No matter the answer, it had clearly been dead for many, many years.

 

The banged on the room to the door and a guard promptly answered. They told him about the skeleton they found, and he said that he would get a ship’s officer to take a look at it. A few minutes later a woman named Sarah joined them with some food. She was curious about the skeleton but had no idea what it could be from. She admitted that the Ine Givar had only done a quick search of the ship before they left. They asked her what her role was, and she told them that she was the ship’s reactor and jump drive engineer. Aryanna talked to her briefly about the ship’s drive and Sarah confided in her that she had a hard time understanding how it worked. It was similar to the Vilani descended drives but had its own quirks she was still discovering.

 

Aryanna mentioned that they knew that there was a psion on board, and Sarah told her that she was the psion. She explained that she had been on the run since she was a teenager and discovered her powers, which were not welcome in the Imperium. She could detect nearby life, knock someone out if they were a few feet away, and even send a telepathic message, but she could not read or hear another’s thoughts. She had joined the Ine Givar because they were fighting for people like her to be able to live a normal life in the Imperium.

 

Aryanna asked if she would be permitted to check on the cryo pods. Sarah said that she would come by after breakfast in the morning.

 

That night, M’han had a strange dream where he was floating in a featureless, grey void with a black pyramid hovering in front of him.

 

045-1118

 

In the morning, M’han told the others about his dream. None of the other travellers had a similar experience during the night. After breakfast, Sarah took Aryanna and M’han to the cargo bay. The cryo pods took up about one third of the bay, with the rest about half-full of old crates. Sarah explained that the crates were aboard when they took the ship from the ship graveyard. She thought they were full of old fabric or something.

 

As they inspected the cryo pods, M’han thought he saw something man-shaped move through the crates out of the corner of his eye. They started searching through the stacks but could not find anything. Sarah told them that she did not detect any life in the cargo bay but them. Aryanna asked her if it was possible that Nadeemi was projecting some kind of image that M’han saw, but Sarah said that it should not be possible while he was in cryo because his brain functions would be incredibly slow. A quick sample of the crates showed that they were indeed filled with bolts of brightly colored cloth. They returned to their room.

 

That night, Marvin woke in the middle of the night to the sound of fighting in the hall. He noticed that the door to their room was slightly open and peeked out. He saw a crewman lying dead in a pool of blood, his throat had been ripped out. M’han was lying in the hall as well, seemingly unconscious, with blood on his snout. Marvin drug M’han into the fresher and cleaned him off in the shower. He then took him back to the room and tied him to the bed with some sheets. Shortly after he finished, he passed out in his own bunk.

 

046-1118

 

In the morning, Marvin was surprised to see that while M’han was tied to the bed, there was no sign of any violence in the hall, nor had any alarm been raised. He told the others what he had seen and M’han said he had no memory of anything other than sleeping through the night. They called for a guard and Zeke, the crewman that Marvin had seen dead in the hall the night before, arrived. They told him that they needed to talk to the captain, and he left to fetch him.

 

They described their dreams to Ulrich and said that, since none of the crew were experiencing these dreams, that they suspected the dreams were linked to the room. Ulrich seemed skeptical of this but agreed to switch the crew staying across the hall with the travellers for the night to be safe. Sarah pulled him aside, and Aryanna could hear her whisper that the door to the crew quarters did not actually lock. Ulrich replied that he did not see any reason to be worried that the travellers would try anything and that he noticed that the guards had forgotten to lock the room they were holding the travellers in at least twice anyway. They switched rooms and spent the day reading on the old data pads that the Ine Givar allowed them to use. That night they set watches.

 

047-1118

 

At 3 am, while Marvin and Hal were on watch, someone yelled, “It’s behind you,” in the hall. The sound of running was interrupted by gunshots coming from right outside their door, followed by more running and firing.

 

The others woke immediately, and Aryanna stuck her head out of the door. She saw one crewman lying on the ground, forward of their room, in a pool of blood. Another, she recognized as Zeke, was in the hall aft of her door and was firing repeatedly back up the hall towards the downed crewman.

 

 

Aryanna decided to risk the shooting, which did not seem to be aimed, and dashed into the hall towards the captain’s cabin. She got hit in the shoulder while running, but her armor stopped most of it. She pounded on the captain’s door and Ulrich opened it; she could see the XO lying in bed behind him. She explained the situation and he pulled her into the room and radioed Sarah to deal with the crewman. A few minutes later, Sarah replied that she had snuck up behind Zeke and knocked him out.

 

Aryanna checked the wounded crewman, Dirk, but determined that he had been killed instantly when he was hit in the head.

 

After a discussion with Ulrich, the XO, and Sarah, they decided it would be best if everyone moved into the cargo bay to sleep for the rest of the trip.