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?
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.
I was called to join some friends in the Thargoid fight early in the afternoon. With little preparation I was off to Hupang. I’d heard of variant Thargoid ships appearing near their motherships. I was lucky enough to encounter a Hunter as it pulled me out of witchspace on approach to Hupang.
The helm pulled and the hull groaned as conventional space welcomed me back into it’s bleak and chilly embrace. Alarms blared as signatures were partially deciphered..
..Frameshift Anomaly detected..
I pulled hard on the controls, thrusters burning as hot as I could make them. All to no avail. Thargoid Hunters are fast and as much distance I gained I lost just as fast when it decided to make another run at me. Some kind of missile, dripping in enzymes that make terrible work of human spacecraft, hammered into me again and again. The ‘Oracle groaned as bulkheads started to suffer the deleterious effects of exposure.
Luck won out, as I found running did me no good I tried to fight. Some hits scored seemed to have scared it back. This gave me the margin of time necessary to make a short hop to another system and patch my wounds before trying again.
