Alex stands in the airlock watching the woman retreat. He briefly gestures to the crew to hold their position while he grips his weapon. “I’ll be just a moment everyone. You know what to do”

Alex steps into the ship and begins to follow the woman. “Ma’am, what happened here exactly. And how can we help your grand daughter once we’ve reached Lua? We’re happy to take her and assist, but we must know how we can do that. I’d also like to file a report about the attack you suffered, even if you think you’re a forgone conclusion we can help others. And admittedly, I’m no doctor, but are you certain there’s nothing that can be done about this splitting sickness?”

A faint static on the radio “Boss, don’t forget the cookies.”

Alex sighs heavily, “my second in command would like to know if you have any cookies as well. He’s convinced helping little old ladies in space somehow nets you home baked cookies.”

~

Inky gives the crew a quick sidelong glance, then shrugs internally and hops lightly onto the derelict ship after Master Alex. They follow behind at a short clip, half-registering the captain’s voice in conversation with the old lady and hiding a smile at the mention of cookies over the radio. Angry agents or not, at least someone has got their priorities straight.

From their position behind and to one side of the captain, they surreptitiously run a scan on the woman for further injuries with a portable infrared sensor, with particular attention to the crack at her scalp. They listen to the old lady’s breathing, as well as for any sounds aboard the ship while the instrument takes measurements of vital signs under the woman’s skin, including temperature, oxygen levels and presence of scar tissue.

The old woman slowly shuffles away, back out to the battle-torn main deck, clicking and muttering to herself. “There is a grain that grows in the dusty red soil of Lua,” she explains. “Its fruit can be processed and ground into a paste that hopefully will halt and even reverse my granddaughter’s mysterious ailment.”

As she talks, Inky surreptitiously runs a scan on the woman for further injuries. She is wasting away, suffering from advanced stages of Splitting Sickness. Her organs have begun to turn to pulp and are rapidly failing. Her swollen heart beats irregularly. A thick puckered seam runs along its length, threatening to burst at any moment. It will be the end of her if the crack in her skull doesn’t split open first.

“It’s genetic. Her sickness, I mean. At least, it’s hereditary. That is, her mother died of it. Poor thing.” She babbles away as she pokes at the rubble on the deck with shaky hands. “I keep her asleep in the suspension unit so it doesn’t advance any further.”

“Ha! Here we are,” she rasps, a lopsided grin scattered across her broken face. She jerkily hauls a metallic cube from behind a pile of rubble out onto the deck. She opens a panel on its side and pulls out a tray of slightly undercooked cookies. A solar oven. “Here you go, dearie.” The tray trembles in her grasp as she holds it out to you.

You hear gunfire coming from your own ship. You spin around to look. Marvelo has fired two signal flares up and away from the ship. The arc of the flares draw your eyes to the Tears of Selene in the distance.

The carcass of an enormous space whale drifts forward from the asteroid field. It’s a gruesome ship. A starsail cobbled together from the bones of dead space whales, sloppily painted with faded, patchy red and white stripes. Scrap and salvage and odd rusted pieces of metal adorn its sides along with humanoid and bestial remains.

“Oh no,” croaks the old woman. “Oh no, they’re back. No no no no no.”

WHAT DO YOU DO

As the ship grew closer and the derelict became more clear Alex gripped the side of the ship. He could see the woman in the window through his telescope, but wasn’t sure what to make of the situation. He assembled the members of the team to the deck to discuss further.

“It’s clear that the ship is adrift. We should probably attempt to help.” Alex stated matter of factly. “However Marvelo has confided in me his strongest suggestions that we not take the risk. We have a clear goal. And the life of this one woman isn’t work much in the scheme of things. The world is at risk.” Alex sighs, “He may unfortunately have a point, but I believe we that if we choose to stare into the abyss and make such a choice we become the monsters we struggle against. And we always have a short.” Alex’s eyes dart to Inky, the seem sad, ashamed. A fleeting statement of understanding is exchanged between the two.

“I say we go, but with caution. If anyone wishes to join me, they may do so. We need someone to remain with the ship to guard it. Marvelo is still not up to excursions, but he’s a crack shot with a blaster and has agreed to watch from atop deck. Lee I need you on the deck gun and look out. Should anything come towards us while we explore the derelict, you have explicit permission to send them to hell. Use your judgement.”

“I’ve done some reconnaisance on the ship already, we can at least go in knowing something about what we face. However anyone who comes needs to come armed, with medical assets, and spare oxygen. We need enough equipment to get in, face the unknown, and save this poor woman’s life.”

(DM: Do I notice anything about the derelict upon inspecting it with a telescope? Signs of attacks? Further what do scans reveal about the derelict and the area around it?)

~

Inky offers the ship’s captain a small encouraging smile when he looks over in their direction but otherwise remains silent during the briefing. The unspoken agreement was that no one was going to let their captain go in on his own despite any individual misgivings on the matter, Fair One’s chosen or not. The only question is who would accompany him. This presents three problems.

Problem #1: Inky’s packs and pod were already prepared before the rumbles overhead about a starsail sighting sounded while they were checking on the salt batteries and compost tea. It would be a pity to not test the equipment before the mission landing. Get more distance out of that deep discount.

Problem #2: his uncle would have Inky’s fireball-roasted head on a platter if he found out Inky was enjoying a freshly harvested watercress salad back on the ship while his nephew faced great peril at the hands of an evil old lady.

Problem #3: the sysorcerer is the only obstacle between Inky and four very angry, heavily armed agents. He is trying hard to be a good captain and leader to them, that anyone could see. Better to be a mobile tea lackey than an immovable target practice lackey.

To the sea dragon it is.

You run a quick scan of the derelict starsail.

It looks as though is has been heavily pierced and battered by artillery, boarded and looted, and left to drift. No doubt the work of some enterprising, opportunistic space pirates.

The ship is broadcasting a weak SOS signal running a loop, but you pick up no other energy readings.

There is a single lifeform reading on board. But you know from experience that such readings are notoriously unreliable in deep space where creatures of the vacuum often tread the thin line between life and death.

You launch a jollyboat and cautiously approach the sea dragon. As your small craft enters its atmosphere, a putrid wind blows across you and its rank air fills your nostrils and lungs. The ship has been adrift for quite some time for its air to be this stale. Another short couple of weeks from now its air will become toxic to breathe.

As you dock, the small woman rushes forward to greet you, hands flitting up and down like moths. Thin wisps of white hair peek around the edges of the shawl she has pulled up like a hood and wrapped around her shoulders. Her weathered taut skin gives her a gaunt, almost skeletal appearance. There is a painful looking crack running across her scalp, down her forehead, and over her face, splitting her features into two hemispheres. Her left eye is large and watery, and droops down her cheek like a runny egg yolk.

“Oh thank you, thank you for stopping!” she wheezes in a raspy croak. “We were attacked by reavers and left to drift. We’ve been out here for weeks, and nobody would stop for us! Oh, we would have surely perished if you hadn’t come by!”

“Oh, yes.” She notices you looking at her, and briefly attempts to hide her face behind a fluttering hand. “I have the Splitting Sickness, you see. It will be the end of me soon, I’m afraid. Nothing that can be done about it now.”

“My granddaughter and I were on our way to Lua,” she continues, disappearing into the ship and beckoning you to follow. “Are you going that way by chance? I must deliver my granddaughter there. She is very sick, you see. And I believe the cure is to be found on the red moon.”

The bridge is dark, save for the dim red glow of the floor lights and the strobing emergency lights. The old woman stops before a long glass box on a raised platform, inside which lies a young woman, eyes closed and still as death, as though deeply asleep.

The old woman looks up at you, her cursed eye gleaming wetly and unblinking in the low light. “Will you help us?”

WHAT DO YOU DO

Blavin’s vouchers enable you to far exceed your modest budget for retrofitting the cyberplasm balloonship for space travel.

Not only were you able to get a portable atmosphere and a starhelm from the ever resourceful Wandering Bazaar. But you were also able to mount a ballista on a turret in the center of the main deck so you can fire large bolts in nearly any direction. And even a mangonel on the top deck: a long range trebuchet that takes more time to load, aim, and fire; but which does considerably more damage than the shorter-range ballista.

Above the Milk Market, a crew of Alex’s agents get the ship ready for departure. They have stoked the burners, and the resident sunspoke has happily filled the balloons with enough lift for the ship to start to pull and strain at its tethers.

You cut the rope loose, and Vay’Nullar falls away beneath you as the ship rises into the sky.

When the air becomes thinner and the sunspoke begins to sputter somewhat, you switch off the burner move the sunspoke into a cold locker in the galley to induce hibernation so that it doesn’t accidentally burn through your limited reserve of oxygen.

You activate the portable atmosphere, a small block of newtonian covered with arcane runes and affixed to the cargo hold. Newtonian is an alchemical substance made of pure density. There are entire volumes in Nullar’s cosmic library devoted to the timelines that met an abrupt, violent end upon the discovery of the substance. Luckily, the alchemists of Basmentaria in your timeline were able to stabilize the element before all of creation collapsed into a singularity. And now it is commonplace for runewardens to attune small pieces of the stuff to spacefaring ships so that each ship is able to sustain its own unique gravity plane. In this way, each ship retains an amount of breathable atmosphere relative to its size; and starsailors are able to confidently walk along the top (and bottom!) of their craft.

Next you head to the starhelm.

Even when it comes to magic, there are certain principles that tend to hold true. One such princple—when it comes to starsailing, at least—is the conservation of energy. There are lots of different kinds of starhelms. But they all consume something in order to propel your ship across the stars.

However endless the treasures of the Wandering Bazaar may seem, starhelms remain quite rare. You consider yourself lucky to find the one that you did. It could have been a costly Forgehelm, requiring constant fuel in the form of precious stones and powerful artifacts. Or an even more costly Bloodhelm, slowly siphoning away your life essence.

Yes, all things considered you could have done much worse than the Emotionhelm that you purchased. All that it requires of you to keep the ship on course is that you scream, rant and rave, and bawl and cry at it periodically.

You imagine it ought to be quite therapeutic, actually.

Portable atmosphere activated, and having fed the starhelm a bit of melancholia, the ship finally exits the planet’s atmosphere. Your crew takes down the balloons once they start to deflate and stores them in the cargo hold. And you set sail for Lua, the Red Lady.

In the distance, you see a pod of gargantuan aetherwaels drifting through the void. Nearby, you see a small school of space guppies swim by and then quickly scatter as a space gull dives at them and tries to scoop up a quick meal.

You have a couple day’s of travel ahead of you, and the very non-empty void of space on all sides of you.

WHAT DO YOU DO?

White blooms look on as Inky turns another page in the book they are reading, a purported bestseller luridly titled The Secret Lives of Plants. The olericulture guide before it had been more appealing, but it was something to do between meals and napping with an eye mask while holed up in the green room.

While Confidence had been taking stock of provisions one night days before the ship’s departure, Inky had dropped in and not so covertly taken over a room with a higher ceiling near the cargo hold, beside an escape hatch. They brought in some grow lights the following evening and asked Confidence to help install them overhead after explaining their plan. Next, they loaded in some dwarf conifers and star magnolias in wheeled containers with weight compression. A nutrient solution pump connected to a timer and long hoses periodically watered and fed the trees. Near the door was an air filter, another useful item from the Wandering Bazaar. It monitored air quality and composition, and could extract various common gases from multiple inputs and pipe them to attached storage tanks. There were two tanks outside the room that were hooked up to the filter: a smaller one for excess carbon dioxide drawn from the atmosphere that can be released slowly in tiny concentrations back into the green room for the trees to absorb (or injected into water with a carbonator for fizzy drinks), and a larger one for extra oxygen produced by the trees and held in reserve. There was also another tank and an unused combinator on board to recombine hydrogen and oxygen.

When the rest of the crew take turns to sleep or patrol the rest of the ship, Inky steps within hearing distance of the starhelm and activates the energy barrier around it. The barrier also blocks off sounds to maximise the energy directed at the helm.

Standing back against a low wall enclosure, Inky begins to play on their violetti, channelling emotions through the lilting notes. The instrument itself was a bespoke affair, an early Yule indulgence years ago, and Inky had conferred at length with the luthier on their requirements and core design. In appearance it closely resembles a smaller, lighter violin while being an octave higher than most violins, making it a great accompaniment to a flute or piccolo in birdsong. However, instead of a mechanical nightingale solo, they feed the helm a selection of nursery ditties — falling bridges, black sheep, blind mice and the like. Sliding a few bars of Bubbytabbies at intervals for best measure. Nya nya.

~

Alex didn’t mind the travel, in fact, he enjoyed the cramped confines of his quarters. The limited world of their space ship a bubble, something he could control, and protect from the chaos that surrounded him. It was no different than the sailing he did planet side, something he had been fond of and his uncle had chided him for being so passionate about. Corraidhin would always titter on about Alex’s studies, and then he’d sneak off and sail out under the stars with Marvelo, and his uncle wouldn’t see hide or hair of him for a handful of nights.

“If only you could see me now Uncle” Alex muttered as he sat behind a large leather bound chair in front of a large ornate desk strewn with star charts, and books on everything ranging from divination, to history, navigation, to munition manufacturing. Some of the titles were unsurprising “Starhelms & You: A Guide to Starhelm maintenance”, “The Big Bang: Everything Delightful About Explosives”, but others were peculiar for Alex “Palmistry for Dummies”, “Superstitions DO Exist, and you’re NOT Paranoid!”, “Ancient Gods and Goddess of Basementaria”.

Alex pushed the books, and loose notes, and maps away from him and placed his cup of coffee in their place. Cold, again. He stared into the dark depths of his favored drink, forlorn. He sighed, and made a gesture, and a small stag drone dislodged itself from amongst the papers and books and latched itself onto the coffee mug, warming it. “Thanks again” Alex muttered “What is this? Sixth time this cup?” he shook his head. He couldn’t focus.

Since they started this trip he’d spent more and more time brooding over these books he’d collected before their departure, barely saying a word to Marv or the others even. The only one he seemed to communicate with on any sort of cadence was Inky. They never forgot to bring a cup of warming tea, floral and fruit notes, to stave off scurvy they’d said.

“That does it!” Alex said to the room at large as he stands, and strides to the door of the cabin. He strides out into the star light, noting the crew has taken note of his sudden appearance. “At Ease!” he barks, and marches up to the starhelm and sits before it.

The explitives come swift and fast. If it weren’t for the emotion reflector the crew and everyone in the galaxy would think rather poorly of Alex, but it felt good. “Neddas you son of a bitch, you and your cursed crystals, and all these snakes slithering around waiting to strike! Light burn each and every one of them!” and once Alex had let his anger burn, the tears came, strong and unrelenting. “I don’t know what to do uncle, you’re within grasp, but I don’t know how to help, or where to go.” and so it went, Alex wept until there were no more tears to weep, and the letter Inky had relayed from his uncle bore an unmistakable tear sodden rumpled look.

When it was over, Alex rose, solemn and calm and meandered across the deck to the bowsprite to take in the empty uncaring void before him.

The atmosphere of most starsails only last a couple weeks before the recycled air starts to get stale, and then noxious, and finally unbreathable. Consequently they often have to ‘refuel’ at planets and moons with breathable air whenever they pass by.

Inky’s ship garden however has been keeping your air fresh and self-replenishing over the last couple of days. The crew are consequently well oxygenated, have been sleeping well, and lack the fatigue that most starsailors experience at this point in their journey.

A pair of space gulls have apparently decided to hitch a ride on your ship, and can be found roosting on the mizzen mast when not hunting for space guppies. They have tried on occasion to steal food from some of the crew, with little consequence but an exasperated shooing away: space gulls are considered good luck, and they are never in any real danger from the crew.

Keeping the starhelm well fed with various sundry emotions, you make good time, and are soon approaching the orbit of the green moon Selene. The moon itself is well out of the way, but your current path will take you through the Tears of Selene, a large asteroid cluster that trails along and fans out behind Selene as the moon orbits the planet. From the surface of the planet, it looks like a wide comet’s tail made of stars of various sizes. From here, it looks like a sea of asteroids of different shapes and sizes.

There are a couple of asteroids in the Tears large enough to support permanent life. Pirate outposts, mostly. Or other parties looking to escape the law—or someone or something else—for one reason or another.

You slow the ship down well below cruising speed to carefully navigate the Tears. You spot the fabled and notorious Rock of Brawl in the distance, a sprawling cosmopolitan city ruled by Scarlet Darling the Pirate King. It covers every inch of both the top and bottom of a large, flat asteroid at the center of the cluster.

Cautiously you eventually emerge on the other side of the Tears. You see a derelict starsail adrift on the other side of the asteroids. It is in the shape of a seahorse with a tucked head, a crest fanning from the top of its head down its back, and a long tail tightly curled toward its front. It lists to the side and drifts seemingly without power, except for some strobing emergency lights behind the seahorse’s eyes, signaling distress.

As you sail closer, you see what looks like a little old woman in a cloak and shawl on the helm waving and trying to hail you.

WHAT DO YOU DO?