Piracy of a sort is always around. Factions vying for power or jostling for position while trying to ensure their opponents own failure.
BPM 87242 was rife with general mayhem and villainy as I was offered a lucrative sum to get involved. The ‘Thunder pulled her own weight well until a pair of Federal Attack Ships locked onto me. I had eked out victory but at significant cost. Suspicions started to arise as I analyzed the data.
I lost the Vigilant Bard to a short but intense fight with a wing of FAS before. Were these the same aggressors?
She called herself Leramil the Wise. A warning sign for sure. Few who call themselves Wise, are. She professed to be a follower of Hermaeus Mora, one of the least-violent of the Daedric Princes.
The libraries of Hermaeus Mora are legendary, the stuff of tangible speculation among any practitioner. Books from aeons past, scrolls and missives unseen by mortal eyes. The literal stuff of legends.
And all you have to do is curry favor with a Daedric Prince.
I was too many days into Vvardenfell, learning a new kind of loathing for the Great Houses, collectively learning who I could trust and finding myself devoid of rational allies.
It was one thing to owe a favor and help the Morag Tong. Being their drinking buddy for when life got tough wasn’t my idea. So I gave one mug of mead and then quietly departed for the road, Wendel in tow. The first boat was just down the path and I had a feeling I’d be off this cursed island before long.
I’d barely made it into town when a merchant had the look of trouble and my curious nature got the better of me. Seems his business partner had quietly closed the doors on the local mine without giving much detail. I recommended sending in guards but some half-arguments suggested it would be more prudent if “I” took a look. In exchange for some coin, of course. I should have kept walking..
The monsters should have been my first warning to leave. The sick alchemist should have been the second. Sadly I’m a glutton for my own curiosity and it took a Daedric shrine to Clavicus Vile to settle my curiosity.
I wonder at times if I’ll ever learn to stop poking my nose into obscure corners. Wendel usually just snickers when I do, he and I both know that my curiosity will be the end of me.
Regardless how I felt there was work to be done. Sorcery does not idly sit around accomplishing itself.
I’d been tasked, as usual, to find some ingredients for a spell whose function wasn’t of my personal concern. The opportunity to see distant lands and avoid the usual politicking that happens was more than enough incentive.
I don’t favor caves but some do have such wondrous vistas that on occasion I remind myself the value of adventure.
I had awoken with a headache the size of Mournhold what screamed like harpies. My mind raced at the sources while visions cleared and wafted away like fog on the morning sun.
All I could recall brief images of a realm I’d never seen before and hopefully would never see again.
There are scarcely few realms one would call “welcoming” outside Nirn. Most were prisons to fiendish beasts and writhing madness.
..the bottle was talking to me. Why me? Uncertain. Why was it talking? Supposedly it was an illusion. But I know a thing or two about Daedric trickery so I was keeping a cautious distance.
A close call with a Thargoid Hunter left hull marks, scoring that seeped into the armor plates. The usual trick of dumping my heatsinks and thrusters at full didn’t fool this one. Several missiles hammered the hull as I pulled into FTL. I’d thought i was safe until the hull breach alarms flashed, something was eating the outer plating.. quickly.
The problem with briefings are the timing. Always at some ungodly hour, in some byzantine format about a foe you’ll likely never see. Years later, hundreds of light-years behind me and I was struggling to recall even a scrap of those ill-timed dispatches. It was reported that sufficient heat at a short duration would burn off the enzyme eating at my dwindling hull. Now was that 120 or 150?
I pulled hard at the helm, diving into close range of the star I’d just arrived at, the hull groaned as the heat built up. I watched with more than a little concern as the thermal registers climbed.. 85, 90.. 98.. 100..
Alarms blared, warnings about internal damage and system failure.. 105.. 110..
Registers cleared 120 and moments later the unexpected corrosion of the hull cleared. I ordered a full service on the hull at port, having that much alien gunk eating at the structure mandated it.
After a little cat-and-mouse I was able to join up with my friends at Brash’s Folly. Intense fighting lit the sky over a darkened planet. Brash’s Folly burned while Thargoid Interceptors and Scouts buzzed about it’s perimeter, harassed by human opponents. Anti-Xeno spread thinly as some mixed with the scouts, screening their allies for attack runs against the larger Interceptors.
Thargoid munitions ripped through ships as fast as they could be repaired and put back in the field. Docking crews worked hellish shifts keeping the threat at bay.
One of the Interceptors hit me, sudden and intense staccato of enzymatic blasts and caustic ozone from a destroyed scout, and a sinister groaning took up in the hull. I put up for repairs one last time as I considered my options.
36 tonnes of medical escape pods loaded I plotted a course for a rescue ship and braced myself for the escape. Two of the larger Interceptors had stationed themselves on the exit path from either bank of launch pads hungry for whatever prey it could catch. Docking clamps released and I punched the throttle, low and fast across the surface. Weaving to avoid a straight line, 5 clicks out I angled for jump and made the first of many leaps away from Hupang.
