Meeting an acquaintance at Frozen Dreams

Mothership

This play report is the second session of my Mothership RPG solo campaign, where my main character and their background is introduced.

You can read previous sessions here: 1st.

The main character

I roll the non-class skills randomly, plus the gender.

Name: Nyx (female)

Class: Teamster

Stats: strength 39, speed 39, intellect 43, combat 22

Skills: first aid, zero-g, mechanical repair, piloting, rimwise

Trinket: stress ball, with the phrase Zero stress in zero-G

Patch: a medic patch

So she knows a bit of everything, and she needs a reason to be at the Faust-C space station, the most obvious reason is money, so she will have a dept of d% x 10000 credits. That makes a debt of 56000 credits.

Having the first aid skill and a medic patch could indicate that she had some medical training before, but she also knows a lot about zero-g, piloting, repairing, and about far away colonies. So I think that she is going to be some kind of pilot, and that she knows all about those skills since she is used to maintaining her ship, and that focus on medical skills is because she was a captain very concerned about the safety and health of her crew. Since she has a lot of dept, she has lost her ship because of something that we don’t know already and now is doing odd jobs at the station.

Putting it all together

Nyx is a transport pilot reconverted to mechanic that works for the external engineering division of Faust-C station. She lost her ship a while ago and has been drowning in debt ever since.

Her experience with vac-suits and mechanical knowledge repairing her now lost ship was able to land her a job in this station, but she is barely capable of making ends meet.

She has been spending long hours repairing the massive Energy Transfer Mirrors (ETMs) that orbit around the station, they are part of the stealth subsystems of the station and are needed to hide the energy readings of the station so that it can remain undetected. The ETMs have a clever design, they work in pairs and orbit around the station. Every mirror has its pair in the opposite direction that transfers the energy from its side to its opposing side. This way, if someone scans the space around the station, they would pick credible data.

But they haven’t been working quite well recently. After a long shift of space walking and running diagnostics in the mirrors, Nyx heads to her favourite AR-bar (augmented reality bar), Frozen Dreams, where you put some glasses on or connect yourself if you have cyberware, and enjoy a meal or have a drink while relaxing in an scenery of your choosing. There are also some other types of entertainment regarding AR in the station, but Nyx doesn’t have a taste for them.

As she is finishing her noodles with some artificially grown meat, someone grabs her shoulder to gain her attention.

He is someone that Nyx knows from an acquaintance, but she is unable to remember when she meet the man. He is bald, and somewhere around his fifties, but Nyx thinks that he looks older than he really is, maybe he has a very physically demanding job…

He tells her that people from the block (oh, he is a neighbour from the same block in sector that she lives), have noticed that her night shift has been reduced and whether she is well.

Here in Faust-C you pay for the time you spent on your bunk, and an extra if you want some storage space for your change of clothes or personal items. These residential blocks are controlled by some mafias and the daily cost of the bunk and storage spaces depends on the hours that people use them. The buildings have fixed expenses each month and the cost of the services that it offers (bunks, storage, cleaning facilities, water) is a simple division of the total monthly cost by the number of usage hours. So if people sleep less hours on the building, the rent would be higher. Mafias will not lose credits if the building is empty so the tenants will need to cope with the cost or live on the streets. The “citizens” of Faust-C rent quarters with people sleeping more or less same amount of hours.

Nyx knows that the man is worried about the credits, not her, but well, she wouldn’t care about the man either. She tells him that she is putting some extra hours at work to save up some credits. The block neighbour tells her that he knows of some people that would like to hire a jack-of-all-trades and that she could maybe do it in her spare time.

Life in the station is organised by three shifts: working, sleeping and spare time (which is usually second-work-time for many people), Nyx has two shifts of work and has been working some extra hours that take time from her sleep shift.

Nyx is interested in what the neighbour is offering, she would like to earn more credits in her spare time (second work time) than she is making now. They exchange terminal IDs. The man’s username is Theora, she will call him that from now on.

Theora tells her that he will sent her the details later, and that she should rest now.

Convinced by Theora, she finishes her noodles, and heads to the residential sector.

Books/Tools used in this session

Tables that I would like to make after playing this session

  • Table of station subsystems and technologies, like the ETMs.
  • Table of station food and food stalls.