Operation: Xulu Serenity

Objective: Find Leutenant Chavez

Background:

Three months ago Lt. Chavez took part in a Jovian military operation that took place in an undisclosed location inside the Kuplier belt. His squad took on an entire clade of ex-humans and prevented a bio-outbreak in a nearby mining station. Unfortunately, every single one of his comrades in arms died in the attack. After being received back at Reagon, he was given several accomodations, was the subject of several interviews and biopics, and was even to receive the Medal of Honor during a parade.

Two months ago, he reported not feeling well and was taking an extended vacation on Europa. Three days ago, he went missing from Europa, less than two weeks prior his speaking engagement on Reagon. He was scheduled to speak during Remembrance day, the same day The Pope is to give an official speech regarding whether transhumans still have souls and are capable of ascending into heaven. Millions of Catholics who died during the fall and were re-instantiated will be visiting in attendance. Tensions are high and security is tight, and the timing seems suspicious.

Mission Brief:

We need to find out what happened to him and bring him back into Jovian space before the Jovian propaganda machine writes him off as a defector. With the amount of publicity surrounding the event, blaming his sudden departure on a foreign power will likely lead to an inter-planetary incident which could destabilize the uneasy peace the Jovians have with their neighbors. The Jovians will also be looking for him, but will likely be uncooperative with Firewalls search efforts.

We’ve arranged to have you egocasted to Europa, where you will make contact with our Liason. We have morphs in cold storage of similar make and model to those that you are currently using. Your contact, Kino, will give you further details upon arrival.

Event: New Arrivals

Trigger: Characters Arrive on Europa

New Objective: Find Jason Mulligan

Notes:

Before the start of the mission, feel free to make a few minor tweaks to the characters morphs, such as random mutations, removing a mod or two, changing their sex, ect. The players will quickly adjust to their new morphs as they are clones of the ones they are already using, albiet imperfect ones. (You can waive the normal rules or give them a day or two to adjust, as you see fit. If any of your players are somehow opposed to egocasting for any reason, then tell them that firewall has an alpha fork of them stationed at the location that the original does not know about. You can do this whenever they need to travel)

Background:

“You arrive at the egocasting facilities in Europa’s premiere resort and tourist vacation destination, [The Krusty Krab]. Kino, a man sleeved in a rather rotund flat with Somoan traits, greets you, placing a wreath of flowers around your neck and offering you each a cigar. ‘Aloha! Please, take a couple hours to adjust to your new morphs. Feel free to order room service and remember to check your brochures in your robes coat pocket for a schedule of todays events.”

If asked about anything related to the mission, Kino will play dumb and suggest that perhaps they talk later. When they get to their rooms, when they check their brochures, they will find a note telling them to meet in the conference room in half an hour. When they arrive, he will apologize for the delay and describe the situation.

According to Kino, Chavez was last seen at the Europa Central Oceanagraphic Institute less than a day’s travel by mini-sub. He had been acting strangely was thought to have suffered some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. He’d spent some time swimming with the dolphins and whales and other imported aquatic life as part of his therapy. Firewall doesn’t know how he managed to slip his Jovian escort, but while he was there he befriended an oceanographer named Jason Mulligan, an A-lister who we think may be sympathetic towards firewall. He is our best lead at the moment.

The charactors will have to be careful approaching him. The Jovians have been keeping him under survielance, bugging his room and monitoring his mesh access. One his co-workers, a miss Adrian Jane, is also a Jovian plant. To talk to him the characters will have to arrange for a private meeting, away from prying eyes. Kino then looks at his ecto and says, “Sorry, I have to get back to work. You’ll have to make the necessary arrangements yourself.”

From there on in, the characters are on their own. They have no weapons or resources aside from the morphs Kino provided them.

Event: Losing the Tail

Trigger: The characters atempt to contact Jason Mulligan

Background:

As the mini-sub approaches the habitats docking facilities, large globes of light filled with bio-luminscent fluid light the waterways to and from the hab. Each one has a gps beacon and on board router that connects to the mesh, forming several rings of light stacked concurrently in the water beneath the ice. A neo-orca swims past, throwing its flipper up and rolling across its belly in a salute. The sub slips past the carbon fiber netting into the habs central dock.

The ECOI allows visitors and tourists in its public facilities, and provides a tourist and therapy service that allows remote operation of aquatic morphs from a puppet socket. They also allow a tour of the inner, off-limit facilities for potential research students and science applicants.

How the adventure proceeds depends on how they try to contact Mulligan. If the send him an invite through the mesh, he will not respond. His quarters are likewise bugged, and during his off hours he is being followed at all times by two jovian spies who tail his every move. At work, one of his colleagues, Adrian, is a Jovian plant who will try to follow Jason wherever he goes. Getting access to the inner laboratory facilities requires a roll on r-rep, with a bonus if they say they are applying for post-graduate work with the proper credentials. Otherwise they will have to confront him on his off hours or somehow sneak into his work facility.

If they can manage to get him away from Adrian or the 2 goons following him and identify themselves using their @ rep, i-rep, he will arrange to meet with them later for a deepwater diving session, where they can talk privately over a VPN. If they can’t and are forced to interrogate him while under survielance, it will almost certainly get picked up by Jovian spies, which will lead to loss of Firewall rep.

Event: Swimming with the Fishes Pt 1

Trigger: Mulligan takes them out for a dive

Background:

Later, Mulligan will meet them in one of the water pens. He will instruct them for a few hours on diving and survival proceedures while the industrial CM fabricates pressurized diving hardsuits for the PC’s. There is plenty of space left in the pens maker and if the players ask, they can use the facilities maker to create some gear. (Though they will have to hack it if they want to upload their own blueprints) He will also hand them a couple of sonic projecters which they sometimes use when they encounter native lifeforms. From there they will take the sub past the mesh bouys and suit up, diving into the coral reefs. (If someone wants to hang back with the sub he will tell them to only leave one person, or else it will look suspicious) Once they are outside the submarine and near the coralite, he will tell his story.

“Chavez went on a few diving expeditions with me, he really seemed to respond to the orca and dolphin therapy. But after a while, he started having really bad nightmares, woke up screaming, thrashing about, that sort of thing. He started to complain that he felt like he’d done something terrible during his last mission, something he couldn’t remember. We did a few neural scans and picked up some hints that his memories might have been edited.”

We’d gotten to know each other a bit, and I’d dropped a couple hints that I was an @-lister. He asked if I had anarchist contacts, if I could find out any details about what happened during his mission. Thats when a hacker friend of mind sent me this XP.”

The XP shows the final moments of Chavez’s squad as they are bottlenecked into the ex-humans habs central control room. The camera points towards a giant cranial mass hooked up to thousands of fiberoptic cables, one of the men screams, ‘Jesus! What is that? What the hell is that thing!” Chavez says, “It doesn’t matter! Prime the thermobaric grenade! Blow it! Blow it-’ followed by static.”

“I didn’t look like the original Chavez made it out alive. He’d been backed up without his knowledge during what he was told was a routine nuerological scan before his mission, the new Chavez was an Alpha fork. It was all part of Jovians PR campaign, turning what might have otherwise been seen as a disaster as a propaganda piece. As to his nightmares, at first I couldn’t believe it, he was reliving the original Chavez’s memory, even though he had no stack. You might write it off as continuity stress, his mind filling in the gaps of what happened, but the way he screamed at night.. it gave me the creeps.”

Now, that might not seem like a big deal to you or me, but to a guy like Chavez, well, he was a hardcore bioconservative, orthodox catholic, the whole bag. After that, he changed. He got real quiet, stopped going on dives. A couple days go by, and thats when these two jovian goons show up, start following him. One day, Chavez approaches me on the downlow, asks if there is any way I can get him off europa and out of Jovian space. I figure, ‘Right on, the guys finnally picked up some common sense.’ So I figure I’ll help him defect, maybe even earn a little @rep on the side for my good deed, but something in his eyes.. he still wasn’t quite right.”

“So I tell him there is a scum ship in orbit right now, refueling on its way to Reagon for the Popes symposium on transhuman redemtionists. If he can lay low until its over, he should be able to leave Jovian space and make his way to wherever they are headed afterwards. I loan him a copy of my passport, have my hacker friend doctor it up a bit, Europa’s port security isn’t that tight.”

If the characters ask about the scum ship, he will explain that it left orbit a few days ago, if they took a curier ship they might be able to catch up with it. If asked what a scum ship is doing in Jovian space, he will explain that they are ferrying passengers to the symposium to hear the popes address, and that the Jovians have made a special exception allowing them to host synths, re-instantiated and other undesirables at Reagon, on the condition that they leave the minute the symposium is over.

Event: Swimming with the Fishes Pt 2

Trigger: Mulligan finishes answering their questions

Background:

Mulligan finishes answering any questions they might have, then explains, “We better get to work, if we don’t bring back some samples my boss is going to ask questions.” After a few moments exploring the coralite reefs, he spots something in the distance.

You see a ovoid black sphere, three meters wide, propelled by a hundreds of flagellia, illuminated by the high lumenosity flood lights. Covered in a nictating membrane, its skin pulls back to reveal thousands of little diamond shaped pods forming a crisscross pattern across its surface, each one a tiny gelatinous cell glowing faintly with red light. Inside each cell, squirming inside the jelly are thousands of tiny larvae. Mulligan swings his shoulder mounted floodlights about and catches a glimpse of a torpedo shaped invertibred, about as long as a mans leg and thick as his calf. The thing opens up its beak to reveal several rows of serrated teeth rotating about its radial axis inside its mouth. Mulligan begins to turn about back towards the sub. Its then that you realize that the tiny larvae inside are not larvae, but tiny invertibreds similar to the large ones floating outside the sphere.

They begin to swarm from inside the cells, headed towards Mulligan. He yells, “Go! Head towards the sub! Oh god, they have no eyes, I- aggggghhhhh!” screaming as one of its beaks attaches to his arm. He looks on helpless as the feeder swarm heads towards him, the small creatures going berserk in a feeding frenzy. The characters then have to survive 6 turns to make it to the sub swimming as fast as they can, or 5 if they don’t try to rescue Mulligan and decide to run. If someone remote controls the sub or is left in the cockpit, they can shave 3 turns off their journey or 1 additional turn if they are sleeved in a morph suited to speed an aquatic environment (That only applies to whoever is sleeved in that morph) Note that if they abandon Mulligan without silencing their feeds, they must make a stress test or receive stress damage as he is devoured alive.

The sphere moves rather slowly, about the same pace as the player characters. It will only catch up with them if they stay still or stand around waiting for it to approach, or are incapacitated and held by one of the larger invertibreds. The adult invertibreds, will begin swimming towards them much faster, catching up with them in a single turn or immediately if they try to rescue Mulligan. (2 for each player character) They can be stunned for one turn with the sonic equipment they have brought with them, (while continuing to move away from them) and players can dodge them with half their fray skill, since they are underwater. (The creatures get their full fray skill, though it is halved for attacking with a ranged energy weapon) Once they bite, they will latch on, likely depressurizing the diving hardsuit and leading to further complications.

Whoever makes it to the sub can fire its concussion depth charges at the orb creature, which will drive it and its symbiotes off. (It has 4 charges, but can only launch one at a time) Failing that, they can simply punch out at full throttle, which will take them out of reach of the orb and other creatures fairly quickly. If they stick around in order to rescue friends under attack by the creatures, the creatures will begin tearing apart the sub, damaging it every turn and possibly getting caught in the subs turbines.

Once they get back they will need to debrief. Firewall will intervene on their behalf after an hour and arrange for a currier ship with an anti-matter drive to intercept the scum ship, Sex, Drugs, & Rock & Roll. One day later, during transit, assumming Mulligan died, the institute will pick up the signal from his stack, extract it from the creatue, and give him the honor of naming the new discovery. You can use whatever imaginative explitives you can think of.

Event: Party Time

Trigger: The characters arrive on the Scum ship.

Background:

The characters, once aboard the scum ship, must investigate and try and find Chavez. (Remember the ship is a microgravity environment) If they ask around or drop Mulligans name, they should find a clade of Gypsies called “The Floating Stones”, who were the last people to see them. Unfortuntely, they do not immediately trust the player characters. The leader of the clade, an exhault named Mac Jagger, will say:

“Well, you don’t look like Jovians. But I don’t trust anybody I haven’t partied with. If you want to know where he is, your going to have to get down with us. The name of the ship is Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll. Choose your poison fresh meat.”

Depending on what they pick, the adventure will proceed as follows:

Sex:

The gypsies will insist they play a game called called dare, where two contestants suggest increasingly outrageous sexual behavior, upping the ante until the one who was challenged concedes, whereupon both the challenger and the other player have to follow through on whatever they challenged each other to do. The scum are told to ‘go easy on them’ and start off slow.

For example:

Challenger: “I dare you to tongue that neo orca’s blowhole

Scum: “See that pissed off ape hominid? Go play Bongo’s on his butt.”

Challenger: “Have missionary sex with your significant other with lights off for the sole purpose of procreation.”

Scum: “Dammit. You win.”

The challenger will then have to sneak up on the neo-hominid and somehow play bongos on his butt, and the Scum will (reluctantly) be forced to have sex with their SO in order to maintain their honor. If the challenger chickens out, it will be up to another character to follow through on whatever twisted thing the scum thinks of.

Drugs:

One of this scum swarms favorite pasttimes, one of the scum rips open a bag of blue tinged white powder in zero G. Scum begin chasing the powder with straws up their nose while the entire ship goes wild. Somebody uploads a remix of the song “Space Truckin’” and the scum start dancing in zero-g. Before the players can indulge, however, Mac grabs their collar and says, “That stuff’ll kill you. I want you to try this: He pulls a lutus from his hand, which unfurls and reveals a handful of colorful buds rippling like rainbow. Take these petals, it’ll be like nothing you’ve ever experienced.

From then on, they must first make a Will x 3 roll or lose all sense of self control. Regardless of whether they make this roll, they will experience vivid hallucinations and loss of inhibitions. The scum will babysit them as best they can while they trip, so hopefully it will prevent their characters from jettisoning themselves out the airlock. If they roll a critical failure they will have a nightmare trip.

Rock and Roll:

If they choose this option, they will introduce them to their clades champion, a brawler in a Bruiser morph named Tiny. (He ain’t really) He is down for any sort of melee, brawl, or hand to hand combat they can imagine. He will even fight to the death, if they choose to do so, and has been resleeved dozens of times. The players must choose their champion, (or if they don’t have anyone who looks like they can handle themselves, they will take two.) No body armor or ranged weapons are allowed, but any melee weapon they can think of can be made in the maker.

Win or lose, the scum will reveal what they know about Chavez, but if they lose the fight, wig out and hurt somebody during their trip, or don’t follow through, they will lose 5 g-rep or 5 @-rep, whichever is highest.

After the party is over, (in about 6-8 hours) Mac will fill them in on what happened. “When he first got here, we didn’t know what to make of him. We’d never partied with a Jovian before, he seemed uptight, like he had a rod up his ass, but once we gave him a few beers he seemed to loosen up a bit. After a while, he started to get real twisted, basically taking everything anybody handed him. He seemed to be having a good time, but when I told him maybe he should slow down a bit, guy flipped his shit. That was a start of 3 day bender.

I’d never seen nothing like it. The guy was technical, man, he was clawing at the hab windows screaming about how he could never go home again, he had no soul, crazy shit. We just gave him a couple days, let him get it all out of the system, but when he finally came down he got real quiet. He apologized, started hanging out in the lower decks, took an interest in our engine rooms.

We have a plasma drive, but keep a small reserve of anti-matter under quaranteen. Last I saw him he was hanging out near the drive bays, soaking up whatever he could about the system and how it worked. He also requested a lot of AR feeds, a lot of stuff from titan, mars, but especially automous AR feeds about the Republic. He seemed hooked, I guess he never really got a chance to study anything outside his MOS and that Jovian propaganda dogshit, but thats where we left him. Still, the guy seemed kinda. I dunno, off. Like he lost or something, he wasn’t quite with it. I hope whatever you guys want with him, you get him some help.

At any rate, Mac will let them know that the main engineer’s name is Willy. He is sleeved in a Jenkins and is a bit of hophead, but he is good with propulsion systems and keeps the ship moving.

Event: Squirrel Hunting

Trigger: The characters question Willy

Willy is a skeezy low down rat of a human being. He spends most of his time either tinkering with the engines, getting high, or coming down off of whatever he can get his hands on. His muse helps him with most of the math involved in maintaining the propulsion systems, and he can and often does call on other scum to assist him, but he does have a fairly good grasp of his chosen field of expertise.

When they approach willy, he will say that he has not seen or heard from Chavez since yesterday. It is fairly obvious that he is hiding something, he will do things like turn his back to the characters while speaking, twitch, stutter, stall for time, and tell lame transparent lies that are obviously false. Anyone doing a thorough check of the engine records will reveal that there is a minute amount of anti-matter missing, (less than a gram) and that the engine bay was accessed less than 12 hours ago.

Anyone checking the spimes over the last 24 hours will reveal a crude loop that plays over and over of Willy sleeping under his chair. It won’t take much pressure for Willy to crack and spill the beans, but if all else fails they can rat him out to Mac’s clade and they will put the squeeze on him.

“Please, don’t! Last time something like this happened I got thrown out the airlock in a hardsuit on a tether for 2 days! Chavez is technical man, he came in here, spaced the militia we had guarding the anti-matter, and took off with half a gram of the stuff in a portable containment unit. I have the spime feed, you can watch it yourself!”

When the players inquire what he was doing during this time, he says, “I was.. uh.. sleeping.” The spime feed shows Willy tying one off before passing out sprawled in his chair. Later, Chavez entering the anti-matter chamber after disabling a guard with a stunner and throwing him out the nearby airlock. After recovering the anti-matter, Chavez freezes for a split seconds when Willy chokes a bit as he snores, then continues on his way as Willy vomits and fall onto the floor into his own sick. 2 hours later he gets up, crawls up to the console, snorts a rail off it then passes out again.

When asked why he didn’t report it, he says, “I thought nobody would notice! I could make up something about needing the extra burn for a course correction. Nobody would even miss Hensen, the guard, the guy was a total asshole, owed money all over the station. Nobody would think twice if he dissapeared. What do I care what he does with the anti-matter? Guy probably wants to sell it on the red market.”

When asked where he is now, he says, “Last I heard he’d hired a body guard and was hiding out in the maintenance crawlspace. That place is a maze. If you’re lucky you can probably find him before we have to deccelerate.”

The players probably should tell someone, but even if they don’t, they will find out eventually and broadcast his punishment on the local mesh feeds. Jenkins will be ‘keelhauled’ once again strung out on a tether for an enitre week, (even as they decellerate) his screams echoing throughout the comms as a wacky sound effect as the DJ plays his morning mix.

Event: Ol Switcharoo

Trigger: The characters search for Chavez in the Vents

If the characters perform a clean sweep of the maintenance crawlspace they will inevitably come across Chavez hiding place, a small maintenance pod located near the exterior hull. It is quite dark in the maintenance shafts and the corridor is booby-trapped with an trip-laser explosive. If the characters detonate it, it will cause a breach and result in the corridor sealing itself off, followed by rapid depressurzation. A mercenary in a Samsa morph will then start returning fire, and due to the closed confines of the corridor combat will quickly become quite deadly.

Hopefully they will defeat the bodyguard without killing Chavez, at which point Chavez will surrender, yelling, “Don’t shoot, I’m in a flat!” Once under interrogation Chavez will reveal that he is in fact, a scum barge crewman named Phillop Gently, who traded morphs with Chavez under the pretense of him posing as a Jovian Space Hero and basking in the glory of retirement for the rest of his life on Reagon. He will tell them that he was using a Jenkins morph, answer a few questions, then be interrupted by the ship. “All hands on deck! Decelleration in fifteen minutes! All Hands!”

Event: The Symposium

Trigger: The characters arrive at port on Reagon.

The decelleration is a hard burn which requires characters to strap in. It doesn’t last very long, after which anyone who wants to enter the symposium stadium must go through a security screening. The entire line takes over 6 hours to get seated. There are less than a dozen Jenkin morphs that arrived with their ship, but the spimes at port are close-circuited and hardwired, only the ones in the stadium are wireless and open access.

Once they are in the stadium they can begin tracking the remaining morphs. Alerting the Jovian Security forces is also a possibility, but whoever does so will be detained until after the event is over. From here on in the clock is ticking. If they can get Chavez (or his stack) in a simulspace simulation before the bomb detonates, they can interrogate track down the bomb and either dispose of the bomb themselves or call on Jovian security forces to do so. Any gunfire is likely to cause a massive panic, and trying to attack or subdue anyone overtly will likely result in a brawl and security being called.

Event: Aftermath

Trigger: The characters defuse the bomb

In the aftermath, the Pope will finish his speech. Though thick with theological semantics and obtuse obfuscations, It will mostly affirm the notion of transhumans no longer having souls, but with just enough ambiguity that it leaves it open to religious interpretation. Later, an autonomist memetic campaign will filter through discrete channels, showing Chavez XP of his death and herioc sacrifice. At the same time, Chavez speech will be delivered by a beta fork instantiated from his last scan. If any of the characters died, they will be resleeved and operation Xulu Serenity will be discretely filed with the players server.