#clearly my brain will latch onto things id rather have a passing interest in

[rainbowgothdisaster]

oh that thing is really fun at some points and fucking awful throw it in the trash and beat the writers at others but overall fine? no thanks i uhhh *looks at the anime ive been obsessed with* im good i learned my lesson ill stop slamming my face on a hot stove now

[vulpinmusings]

Ski’tar and Friends part 16: Undercover Gladiators

This week, Ski’tar, 6, and Vemir are given another not-exactly-legal mission by Historia-7 and have to fight in a gladiator pit as a result.

Beginnings

Last time

Archive

The trip back to Absalom Station from Elytrio was relatively quick and uneventful, aside from crossing paths with that freighter crewed by a single, lonely Ysoki again.  Upon arrival, we reported straight to Venture Captain Arvin, handing over the data we’d collected and summarizing the state of affairs on Elytrio.  Arvin was very pleased with our performance and said that our group’s string of successes (the minor case of Vemir’s death notwithstanding) was attracting the attention of First Seeker Lorenzo, the big boss of all Starfinders.  Arvin had also caught word of our group’s tradition of post-mission drinks, so he rewarded us by having the Society cover our tab for this round.  Ship Captain Navasi agreed to join us when we asked, but Iseph had “personal matters” to attend to.

After some discussion of our options, we decided to go to a cocktail bar in the Eye called the Business Proposal, which logically caters to those in the corporate sector.  We took a booth, ordered our drinks, and Navasi took the lead in our conversation.  He asked each of us our reasons for joining the Starfinder Society and what our long-term goals were.  I phrased my quest for the Perfect Boom in terms that didn’t paint me as a mad bomber, and Navasi promised to pass that info along so that we might get sent to places with more exotic compounds to find.  6 and Vemir’s stories weren’t as fancy as mine; Sixer had mostly wanted in on the prestige of the Society and Vemir had intended to only do the one job but was sticking around because he tended to find good bounties along the way.  Navasi gave us his story in return (he’d always been entranced by what the Society stands for), and gave us a little more information about Scored Stars.  It seems that after the Disaster, an impassable barrier appeared around the Scored Stars area so that nobody can get in and anyone who may have survived can’t get out.  The first Seeker’s main priority, and by extension the whole Society’s is figuring out how to get that barrier down so we can investigate.  Our group wasn’t seasoned enough to be directly involved in that work, but Navasi thought that we’d get there sooner rather than later at the rate we were rising in the Society’s eyes.

Just as our drinks arrived, our comms pinged.  Historia-7 was calling to ask us to come back to the Lorespire complex immediately.  Navasi went with us to the Complex, but had to part ways with us there because he had a meeting with the First Seeker.  Historia-7 was deep in the Archives when we arrived, and she barely disconnected enough to acknowledge our presence and give us our marching orders.

While Historia had been going through the data we’d brought back from Elytrio and looking for leads into Scored Stars, she’d discovered a discrepancy in the Society’s archives.  Some of 7’s predecessor's notes had been located and decrypted, and they mentioned a corporation called the Arch-energy Consortium that the Society had no other records of.  Historia-7 wanted that gap of knowledge filled, as she believes Arch-energy may be a front for something sinister and possibly information that could useful for solving the Scored Stars conundrum.  The security around the Consortium’s data was surprisingly tight for such a small company; the only weak point Historia-7 could identify from the old notes was Envar Tam, the son of the CEO.  Arch-energy’s main base of operations, a space station called Brilliance, has an ampitheater were gladitorial-style fights are held for the entertainment of the employees, and Envar is a particularly big fan.  Historia wanted us to go take part in the fights to charm our way into Envar’s good graces and then manipulate him into letting us access his mother’s computers so we could steal as much data as we could.

And to try and avoid linking all this back to the Starfinders, we would need false identities.

Good thing I knew a guy.

ID-man’s shop was dirtier than the last time I’d been there, but the fat human was still in more or the less same shape.  For three false ID, he quoted a total of 9000 credits, which Vemir gladly paid as thanks to Sixer and me for bringing him back to life.  My own credits were starting to run out, so I didn’t argue.  ID-man worked quickly, and soon three new gladiators were walking the streets of Absalom Station: Ezo-14 the android, Veldaro the Kasatha, and Blip the Ysoki.  To further separate ourselves from the Starfinders, since we were starting to become slightly famous, we went shopping for disguises.  I obtained some fur dye to make myself brown with black markings instead of solid grey, Vemir altered his outfit to emphasize his scars and missing arm, and added some warpaint to complete the effect, while 6 subjected himself to an overenthusiastic barber and painted himself blue.  It didn’t quite seem enough in Sixer’s case, but we had no time to fix it.

The three of us took the Odyssey out to Brilliance Station by ourselves, since leaving crew members behind after docking would have been suspicious.  Luckily, the trip was only four days.  The Odyssey is not a fun ship to spend a lot of time aboard.  No engineering lab.

Docking with the station was no problem, but we nearly ran into a snag when station security checked our bona fides.  Something tipped the security Lashunta off, and I had to quickly hack into the comms and modify the data we were sending to erase the incriminating info and make it look like a glitch.  Once we were cleared, we were escorted straight to the amphitheater with no time to prepare and no instructions beyond “if you die, at least try to make it entertaining.”

That did not bode well.

We couldn’t make out much of the crowd as we stood on the arena floor thanks to the reflected angle of the local star shining through the transparent roof, but in the shaded box for high-profile spectators we saw a Lashunta man, probably mid- to late-adolescent, with a wildly colored hair and smoking what seemed like an extremely unwise amount of some drug or another.  Possibly many different drugs at once.  He was clearly eager to watch the fights and just a clearly lost in his own addled brain-space.  Fortunately, he was just there to watch, not to run the show.  

An unseen announcer prompted us to put on a little pre-show to hype up the crowd before the actual fight.  While Vemir simply posed and gestured in an appropriately intimidating manner, I opted to do some acrobatics.  I back-flipped onto my drone, rode it for a bit as it did figure-eights then jumped off, rebounded off one of the columns in the arena, and landed back on the drone as it was still moving.  6 tried to show off his strength by punching one of the columns, but wound up just cracking his hand instead of the column.  That killed the mood a little, but the crowd still seemed to be mostly in our favor.

Then they brought out the monster.

I was glad we wouldn’t be expected to fight other people to the death as part of our cover.  Not that I have problems with killing per se, of course, since I’ve done plenty of that, but something doing it just for sport seems… dirty.

At any rate, our foe was a vicious Crest-eater, a large and very angry six-legged carnivore with bull-like horns and a number of grasping tentacles on its back.  Looking to redeem himself in the eyes of the bloodthirsty crowd, 6 charged straight on with sword at the ready.  His opening blow turned into parrying the Crest-eater’s lunge, but at least he was playing to his strengths from the outset for once.  Vemir and I took cover behind a column while I sent my drone rolling up in anticipation of acting as a shield for Sixer if needed.  I decided this would be a good time to try out a new grenade I’d been working on: frags modified to contain some of the crystallized poison from Ulmarid.  My throw fell short, but the blast was at least flashy enough to score some points with the crowd.

6 took a bad bite from the Crest-eater, but paid the beast back with interest, severing a couple of tentacles.  Vemir lined up a shot and sniped the beast hard.  The Crest-eater tried to back away as Sixer continued to lay into it, and spat out a venomous-looking acid that hit both 6 and my Drone.  Sixer took off one of its legs for that. He was certainly making up for his poor showing in the hype-up.

Vemir finished the fight before I could contribute any more, landing a shot that went straight through the best’s head and hit some internal organ hard enough to make the creature explode in a shower of gore.

As the adoring crowd showered us in flowers and pocket-change cred chips, the Lashunta druggie vaulted out of his seat and ran over to praise us for our performance, although he went to my Drone first before realizing it wasn’t actually sentient.  He then latched onto Vemir as his favorite out of us and introduced himself as Envar Tam and offering to give us a personal tour of the station.

I immediately started recalculating our odds of success given Envar’s utter lack of focus.  On the one hand, he was loopy and cheerful enough to be easily led to whatever we wanted, including his mother’s private office and computer.  On the other hand, I had serious doubts about his ability to stay focused on any given thing for more than ten seconds.

This was going to be a chore.