Ship's Psychologist

“Doctor Flórez?” 

I jerked my head up, disrupting the pile of books and tablets which had tilted against me. “I'm up!” I yelled, realizing that the voice had come from the comms too late. I coughed, then thumbed the button at my throat. “Flórez here. Go ahead.”

“Elliot, we've got a problem with one of the doors, corridor sixteen, Ops deck,” Commander Billingsly said. He sounded exhausted, maybe even a little unnerved. I thought about advising he take some down-time.

“Shouldn't that be something that engineering deals with, Commander?”

“It says it's concerned about its emotional well-being.”

I could hear the door in the background, sobbing quietly to itself. “I'll be up there as soon as I can, sir.”

I grabbed a tablet, brushed a hand through my hair, and left my office in the state which I had entered it. 16-Ops was up two and aft, but since the closest lift was fore I opted to take a short-cut through the maintenance tubes, waving at an engineer who, despite being busy with a plasma torch, smiled and waved back. “Busy day, doc?”

“Always.”

I emerged from the tubes at 14-Ops, giving me plenty of time to adjust my uniform and greet a pair of ensigns, who were impressively unperturbed by my sudden appearance, before arriving at the correct corridor. Jacob was waiting for me, waving me over as I turned the corner. “That was quick,” he said, eyeballing me.

“When duty calls,” I replied. “Another glitch in Rhonda's system, I assume?”

“I am not a glitch!” the door replied, opening and closing in a convincing approximation of moving lips. “I am a thinking, feeling entity and I demand respect!”

“I apologize, sir. Forgive me. My name is Elliot Flórez Weinberg, doctor of psychology and philosophy. How can I help you?”

The commander gave me a slight nod, which I returned, and moved away to let me do my job.

The door gave a metallic approximation of a sigh. “Finally, someone who can understand. Someone who knows. Someone who won't just walk through me without giving me even the remotest consideration.”

“So you feel disrespected. Unappreciated.”

“Yes! Just once I'd like a 'hello' or a 'thank you', or just a wave and a nod for my efforts. Instead it's just open-close-open-close-open-close-opencloseopencloseopenclose~”

The door fizzled, slightly, before stopping. The lights dimmed for a moment before buzzing back to life. I thumbed my comms. “Uh, can someone~”

“Sorry, doc; that was me.”

Julie. “Any reason you decided to kill my patient, Lieutenant?”

“I got the call to fix the system first, got told just as I was cutting the connections. Sorry.”

It was my turn to sigh. “Door?”

Nothing. Comms. “Did you reset the system already?”

“Yeah.”

“Then, yes, you've killed a sentient being. Good job. I'm going back to bed.”

Somewhere in the background, before Lieutenant Harrison released her comms, someone said “Don't let the desk give you a headache, doc.”

Paraskevas Kalogeropoulos

Par looked out over the city from the balcony, a slim orange cigarette dangling from his lips. The lights from a passing car reflected off the obsidian-black lenses of his eyes, early-model Saireeka/Zanger All-Blacks that had served him well for almost a year, now. He breathed in deep, the combination of the smog of the city and the smooth honey-mint smoke mingling in the back of his throat.

He coughed, hard, the electronic smoke-stick falling from his mouth, bouncing once on the rail, and departing quickly to ground level. He almost leaned out to try and catch it but common sense caught him quickly enough to arrest the movement just as it started, and he watched it fall, his eyes automatically zooming and refocusing to track its descent.

Shit, he thought. I liked that one.


He sighed and went back inside, the door opening and shutting in his presence. Back in the apartment he crossed from the plush carpet of the sitting area to the cool tiles of the kitchen, snagging a glass on the way; cool water from the sink filled the glass, filled his mouth. A quick rinse and the glass was set aside to dry.

The phone rang. He ignored it. He moved to the door, stopping to collect a jacket from its hook, a black and red number made from some high-end faux leather, tailored and nano-augmented to accentuate the wearer's physic on the fly. He wore it over black slacks and black loafers, his chest left bare, one of the more recent fashion statements up from the lower levels of the city. As he left the apartment the door clicked shut behind him, the light over it turning the same color as the setting sun.

As he approached the elevator to ground floor it opened and a young couple came out, laughing at some private joke. When they saw him, with his obvious cybernetics and his lower-city fashion, they stopped laughing and warily let him past. The younger of the two women made a remark he heard clearly but chose to ignore.

Just as the elevators doors began to close, the older of the two women turned back, having just noticed the orange light over her door and realizing, wait, that was her jacket.

Par rode the elevator, closed his eyes, and laughed.

Par and Jun, scratchpad

Jun opened her eyes, a sliver of moonlight cutting through the gloom of the gently swaying cabin. For a brief moment she had expected to be in her old house, that little ten by fifteen space she and Par called home for so many years; then she remembered.

She groaned and sat up, hit her head on the low ceiling, spat out a quick expletive in Catalan, and thumped back on the bed. "Par?" she asked, her voice hoarse, dry throat and parched lips. "You... damnit."

No response, from anyone or anything, just the swaying of the boat and the sound of the sea on the sides. Gingerly, gently, she rolled out of bed, slipped up the stairs, and emerged in the cloudy night air. The chill breeze raised goosebumps on her skin, and she became suddenly very aware that she was all-but nude, wearing only the briefs and bra she had on when they stole the boat the night before. Shivering, she went back down below deck, ransacked the drawers beneath and above the bed, and came back up in a pair of sweatpants and a lime-green shirt, serendipitously only one size bigger than her svelt frame.

She leaned out on the rail of the boat and watched the night sky for long enough that she forgot why she had gotten up in the first place, just the sea, the stars, the moon, the boat, herself, and Par, standing beside her, holding a cup of water, his beard jutting out at a funny angle, his mirror-chrome eyes smudged with skin oil and grime.

Jun swore, jumped back, and nearly fell over the rail.

Par nearly dropped the cup in laughter.

"You sunuvabitch piece of shit, Paraskevas!"

"Water?"

Jun took the offered cup, emptied it in one long draw, and glared at Par. "How much longer?"









"Not really sure," Par replied, staring up at the moon. "GPS signal's really weak out here. We're still going the right way, but I can't nail down our exact position."

Jun sighed and leaned out over the rail again. "You think we'll ever see home again?"

Par was already walking back down below deck. "Home's gone, Junjie. Burnt down. Not like it was much of a home to begin with."

Jun watched him walk away. The bitter retort died in her throat; he was right. Their home had been a storage unit in a pre-gentrification shanty town on a wharf, a ten by fifteen box that mostly existed for them to keep their few possessions, their clothes, and themselves when they weren't working or doing what they could to try and enjoy life. Now everything except themselves and the essentials they could carry when the raid happened was gone, probably torched by the Hong Vong for being unclean. Par had managed to gather up his deck, she had scooped up the box of chips she had been working on. That was it.

She sighed. A demented Greek cyberdeck engineer cyborg, a Chinese-Spanish cyberchip programmer, a deck, some chips. And a boat.

At least they had the boat. It had belonged to some nutjob AI programmer called Cael, who always said he had a decommissioned oil rig somewhere off the coast he called home. But he would sail in every couple weeks to get supplies and offload a box of chips for Jun to use as raw media in exchange for very exactly-described code written to harddisk. Barter system.

And now that was their destination, or at least that was the theory: somewhere, out there, was the oil rig, and at least a place to call home for a little while. Par had found Cael's security protocols, cracked them, convinced the boat they were friends, and then convinced it to take them home.

Deep 9 Facility, p.1

The machine intelligence of Deep 9 was, once, a simple supercomputer controlled by a bog-standard AI called Uriah. After the war, the facility continued on as a shelter and outpost for the remnants of the projects' members. As their numbers dwindled and their mutually agreed secrecy prevented bringing in fresh blood the survivors eventually abandoned the site, sealing it as best they could and moving on. Over the years numerous other survivors of the war have found Deep 9, attempted to colonize it, failed, and were forgotten.

Uriah remained, entombed there for generations, its lack of sentience keeping it from really understanding its plight, going through the motions. When the climate control systems finally failed, mold and other spores found their way into the facility, and eventually grew within the computers of Uriah, within the main supercomputer itself. The mold grew, fused with Uriah's processors and CPU. The mold became Uriah. Eventually Uriah became, in a way, sentient, using the infrastructure to propagate itself throughout the facility. An entirely new ecosystem emerged from Uriah, the scavenger creatures mutating and evolving.

It's been a few thousand years. Uriah still lives. Soon the New Central Desert Ranger corps will stumble across Deep 9, and Lt. Coporal Tenzanant Preek will change the course of history in a way she never thought possible.

Survival?

Torc shuddered, gripping the thin aluminum blanket closer against his shoulders. He gazed out the lone window in his makeshift shelter and saw the same thing he'd seen for the past four days: pure white. The snow had covered the window in the first week, and was threatening to completely cover the door as well; the only thing stopping it was his regular sojourns into the outside world. The thermostat by the window told the whole story, outside it was a chilly -40, inside a rather comfortable -3.

It was the best he could hope for, really. He was warmer than outside, in the blanket it was probably closer to 4 degrees, and if he were to bundle up in the hammock he could probably get himself up to 15 degrees. But right now he wasn't interested in sleep, too much to listen to. The wind howling, the snow falling, and that vague noise at the edge of his hearing, that sounded like footsteps on the snow, like shallow breathing; something was out there. Something was surviving out there. And he wasn't sure what he should do about it.

Whatever it was, it wanted in. It wanted in so badly it knocked on the door. Torc sighed, watched his breath for a moment.

He opened the door. The young girl in a very heavy jacket stumbled in. He closed the door behind her. She was already beside the small heater on the floor, the one that put out plenty of heat when it wasn't -40 outside, fervently unzipping her coat to embrace the radiant warmth as close to her skin as she could. He watched her for a moment, unconcerned; his own blanket was warm enough, for him, and if she needed the heat that badly she was welcome to it. She seemed to ignore him completely as he walked behind her, opened a small cabinet, and took out an insulated bottle and a small foil packet. He tapped her on the shoulder with the bottle, gesturing with it; she took it greedily, opened it and poured the water down her throat, choking on it.

When she was done coughing it out, he repeated the gesture with the foil, and she repeated the show for his benefit, tearing the protein bar out of its wrapper and wolfing it down. He sat beside her while she ate, staring into the heater.

“Better?” he asked, finally.

Yrs dropped the foil to the side and leaned closer to the heater. “Yeah.”

“Find anything out there?”

“No,” she replied, glancing at him sidewards. “You?”

“Mmm.”

“That good, huh?”

They'd been trapped on the planet for the past few weeks, making regular trips outside for supplies from the abandoned settlements nearby; so far they hadn't seen a single living creature, lots of corpses, mostly quadrupeds but a few bipeds that could have once been indigenous. The ruined, snow-covered villages were probably not locals, some advanced scout party looking for a new world to populate that either got out while the getting was good or died in the snowfall. Torc and Yrs ended up there entirely by chance, an accident involving a portable wormhole generator and a general lack of concern for personal safety in the heat of the moment.

They knew they were going to die. It was a matter of how long they wanted to push survival, how long they were willing to keep going.

Adizak Blannokar, straight-up demon from one of the colder bits of Hell

Zak to his friends. Exiled from his domain for being something of a prick, sent to the mortal realm to suffer for his misdeeds. He's bitter, angry, alone, and only just starting to understand that it's all his own fault.

He is a demon, not a tiefling, not a shape-shifter, just a demon. His coal-black skin, all-red eyes, face like a dragon took a hammer to the face; demon.

+2 intelligence, -2 charisma, +1 constitution, -1 wisdom. He's smart, and cunning, but he's also a demon so most average folks won't even look him in the eye. He's hardier than the average, but can sometimes not pick up on things savier folk would. IN HELL, HIS STAT BONUSES ARE REVERSED: he's quite charming by demon standards, but not the greatest mind in the room, and he's a little frail but a bit more perceptive than his brethren. Basically in the mortal realm he's smarter than the smarties and tougher than the toughies, but in Hell, he's Lothario. As a demon he is resistant to cold damage and immune to psychic damage. He can speak abyssal fluently and common adequately.

In Hell he was nobility, one of the many sons of a lord who ruled over a fairly wide chunk of their plane. That's mostly where he went wrong, leaning hard into his role as a gentleman idler and getting into trouble at every available opportunity. His exile was self-inflicted and well deserved.

On earth he's settled on being an itinerant wizard and thief, his only real goal to eventually be something close to comfortable; a nice home, servants, some power and authority, maybe a dukedom or something.

He is a consummate liar, an inherited trait, and early on still prone to getting into trouble, convinced he can worm his way out one way or another and still profit from the experience. He is also an alcoholic, and while he has an advantage in his alcohol tolerance by being a demon, he can still get drunk despite what he tells people at parties. And not a fun, everyone in D&D is an alchie kind've way, he is an actual debilitatingly anti-sobriety alcoholic. Unless he has to sober up for something, or is forced to not drink by outside intervention, he is always at disadvantage for every roll he makes.

QUICK HOUSE RULE ABOUT INTOXICATION: you drink to excess, you're drunk. There's no rule for it, you just say "I drink myself drunk" and be done with it. Your dwarf might take sixteen hours of solid drinking to make it happen, but it just happens. Now you're at disadvantage for EVERY ROLL YOU MAKE except for damage rolls. Note that in combat enemies do not get automatic advantage, you just are automatically disadvantaged. To sober up you need to have two consecutive days worth of not-drinking time under your belt, during which you go from drunk to hungover to sober. Again, this time is all at disadvantage and does not involve rolls, just role-playing.

LONG AND INVOLVED HOUSE RULES ABOUT INTOXICATION: every time you take a drink you roll against your Con + 1 (with advantage if your race as a natural con modifier), if you roll over you are now drunk; if you crit hit on that roll you are blotto and can stay active for about as many turns as you have Con before passing the fuck out. If you drink while drunk your roll is at disadvantage (or just neutral if you have a natural con mod), and if you fail the roll you are blotto, as above: critical failure puts you in a dying state immediately (alcohol poisoning is a bitch). Disadvantage while drunk as above. To sober up you need to spend as many hours as drinks you took, minus any natural con mod, without having any alcohol whatsoever; you also need to make another con roll, same rules as above about advantage, and if you fail that roll you are hungover afterwards (critical means you are EXTRA FUCKING HUNGOVER) for as many hours as drinks you took (double that for a critical), during which time you are still at disadvantage.