I'm known for having an invisible ship, so faking docking it isn't hard: I rent a shuttle bay, run an illusion of an invisible ship landing while I cycle the airlock, mark off a section with stanchions (you know,those poles you see at movie theaters, with fancy rope strung between them to organize lines... the ones I make come out neon pink, though) and associated stanchion rope (likewise) so it looks like I've marked off where the ship is located, then open the Keyhome in an appropriate place. After that, I go in, prepare credsticks for everyone, and lead them all out, handing each a credstick loaded with a thousand credits, calmly instructing each: “Please do not speak of what you saw in my ship; trade secrets and whatnot, I'd rather not have the information spread around.”
It mostly goes smoothly, although three people get a slight gleam in their eyes when they hear that… well, it's probably harmless if they spill what they saw (they saw the resulting structures, but not how I made them). Still, I do take note of the people that did, quietly grabbing pictures of them with my magic com unit.
That done…my current business at Absalom Station is largely concluded… but I do have effectively unlimited cargo space, and Absalom Station is a trade hub, which makes it excellent for picking up goods. Still… Stephanie will be giving birth to her twins soon, so they'll just be sitting in my hold until then.
Not that I have a shortage of space.
I do my normal buff routine for this, find a load of textiles, have invisible summoned creatures handle the loading, dismiss them, and head back to Stephanie, all nice and uneventful… an impression of which I'm disabused a few days into the Drift travel while I'm random-checking a summoned creature's work on thruster maintenance.
“Admiral,” Stephanie begins, letting me know this is official, “Someone on board is breathing.”
Cowbird and Linda technically still have biological functions, but the Cowbird has permanent shell of air (as do all of the summoned creatures I keep on board), while Linda doesn't need air at all thanks to buffs. So if Stephanie detected oxygen use in the life support… “We have a stowaway, then?”
“Yes Admiral, that's my conclusion as well.”
And this is a Huge ship, with individual cabins for fifty crew members, plus gateways to the others, engineering spaces, and many other hiding spots… wonderful, “Thanks. Please make a list of areas within yourself that you can't directly observe. How recent is the respiration?”
“The stowaway is definitely loose inside me, within the last few minutes.”
“Great. Initiate a lockdown, and let me know if any doors open. I'll organize a search….” as my ship hastens to comply, I get to work.
We already have fifty summons running around, with True Seeing, even. I just need to add a few buffs: Ironguard, to let them walk through the metallic walls on ship; Enable Function, to give them ten ranks in Perception; Acute Senses, to give them a thirty point bonus to Perception (although I need to fake this one via Limited Wish); Junk Armor so they're hard to hit (in case the boarder is hostile when found - also duplicated via Limited Wish). They're already pretty tough from earlier buffs, and now it's going to be very difficult to hide from them… which is the point.
Oh, and one other thing… “Stephanie, put me on the ship wide, please.”
“Yes Admiral,” she answers, “You’re live everywhere except here.”
I briefly buff up my skill check, “All hands, this is Fleet Admiral Alex Abrams,” I might as well play it up, the stowaway is my audience, “we have reason to believe we have a stowaway, which is why we have the ship locked down. We'll be conducting a systemic search shortly. Legitimate crew and passengers have nothing to fear,” not that we really have any passengers, “as for the stowaway: Yes, I know you're listening. This is my home territory. You WILL be caught and you are UTTERLY outgunned. The only question is whether I'll be in a good mood because you surrendered, or a bad one because I had to track you down.”
Yes, I'm rolling Intimidate. Seven ranks, twelve points of Charisma bonus, three points because Karmic Blessing makes it temporarily a class skill, fifteen points from Divine Insight, four from Greater Heroism, and a “natural” twenty from Surge of Fortune: I get a result of sixty one. To put this in perspective, an opponent for a twentieth level party would need a check of just forty five.
I use my magic com to tell Stephanie to cut the feed.
She obeys quickly: “Done, you're offline.”
“Now let's find out which spells were a waste of…”
“Admiral, you have a call on the ship's comm system,” Stephanie is quite helpful.
“Put the idiot through... to my com, please.” So the buffs oo the crew, then. Well… they don't hurt anything, and will still be there later.
“I'm sorry, Admiral,” the voice is… awful: It sounds like a thousand people screaming in pain, with any given person being silenced or permitted to scream, timed to make words, “but my lord… he was just SO convincing that I could make this work… steal your tech… but obviously not. I'm in crew cabin thirty nine at the moment… come get me.”
I pause a moment, “I'll be down shortly,” and cut off the com. As I walk, I ask Stephanie, “Can you see… him?... in crew cabin thirty nine?”
She answers quickly, “I can NOW, but I couldn't before. Maybe he has some form of invisibility to machines?”
There's a Technomancer spell for that: Invisibility to Technology, “That would do it, and would be a must-have for getting past most security in this day and age, wouldn't it? We were just outmaneuvered… until YOU detected he was on board. Do not tell him how we found out, please.”
“Yes Admiral,” she sounds happy.
We make our way down to the unused crew cabins, and turn into number thirty nine. It's nice, if a little small: An individual apartment (complete with kitchen, bedroom, living room, office, and bathroom - including a tub with jets) with a luxury finish at about seven hundred fifty square feet of floor space, and the same fake windows and skylights found elsewhere (projector units tied to the ship's sensor data to make the illusion of windows). Waiting for us in the living room? Our stowaway.
He is sitting on the couch. He has horns coming out of his forehead, curling back over his head through his ‘hair’, down behind his ears, back up in front of them, and then continuing around and around into a spiral that never seems to actually end. His hair? It's fire. No, not on fire, his hair itself is flickering red and orange flames atop his head, held in place as though it was professionally styled and gelled hair. His skin? A subtle pattern of various currency symbols in dark red on jet black… what little of it I can see, as he's wearing what looks like a silk business suit… dyed black, of course, with a dark red undershirt, a jet black tie (in a Windsor Knot), red silk gloves over his pointed claws, and highly polished black shoes (with dark red silk socks). He wears gold wristwatches (one on each wrist), and has diamond lapel pins. I avoid his eyes… because there's nothing there. Less than nothing: his eye sockets aren't just empty, they're a hungry darkness, actively pulling all the light inside and snuffing it out… and his soul is the bluest blue I've seen since I started seeing souls. Neon blue doesn't cover it: It's like he took the concept of ‘blue’, refined it to the purest blue possible, and then turned it up to eleven. And it is PERFECTLY aligned with his body. If I focus on his soul, I see every single detail of his flesh, like he's standing naked in front of me... but at least he's not 'excited'.
“Oh, that's because he's an Outsider,” Patricia explains, “He's made of refined soul essences. There is not one tiny spec of feminine nature in him. We only see masculine and feminine essence, but all of him will be lop-sided like that… he'll have a strong flavor, like licking sugar directly.”
Ah. Good to know… and while he's pretty obviously an evil outsider, I don't recognize his species, and that means he's pretty high up there in CR. This makes me nervous: If I don't know what he is, I don't know what he can do… and he is smiling like a used car salesman, which makes it worse. I'm not going to let that show, though. I send a note to Euler and Linda to get over here via my magic com unit. I don't want to face this guy down by myself.
Mostly because if I kill him, I'll level again, “So who are you, why are you here, who sent you, and what was the plan for after?”
“Call me Stan, I'm obviously not giving you my true name; I'm here because my lord made a good case I'd be able to steal your tech for our use. His name is…” he rattles off a dozen seemingly-random syllables….
“Did you catch that?” I send to Stephanie over my interface-free magic com.
“Every syllable,” she sends back.
“...but please don't tell him who told you. And I have some armor packed away in a null space chamber with a Drift Escape Module. I was to put that on and activate it once I'd secured a data module that had your technology's details on it,” he sighs, “but none of these three ships of yours with their weird link-ups seem to have any information on how you do it.”
“Of course not, “ I buff up and lie, “Those are on my research base in The Drift; I'm not crazy enough to drag the secrets around with me. Your mission was doomed from the start.”
“That's a pity…” as he's saying this, my Sense Motive skill picks up on something: This guy is Charmed.
And that's when Euler arrives, Linda in tow.
Euler takes one look at the evil beast and asks me verbally, “Why are you bothering with an Adikodaemon trapped by a Charm Monster spell?” Right, Euler is buffed sky-high, and has a lot of skill points to boot.
Linda laughs, “He is hilariously far beneath you, my goddess. Please allow me to kill him for you: There's no reason to soil your hands.”
Stan seems to be a little slow on the uptake… but he IS mind-controlled, “Goddess… CHARMED?! ME?!?!”
I sigh, “I have some abilities commonly associated with deities, and yes, your mind isn’t your own,” I turn to Euler, deliberately not naming her, “Do you know Dispel Magic?”
“No, I haven't figured that one out.”
“That's easily solved, if you don't mind a slightly larger chest. Here…” I reach over, holding an Enable Function spell for Euler, to grant her the Expanded Arcana feat, which in turn will grant her Dispel Magic.
“More spells and bigger guns?” she leans into my hand, so that her bosom makes contact, and I feel her chest swell slightly as the spell takes hold… and her tap stiffens under my hand, “How can I say no? Can you give me the entire library?”
She doesn’t have any more essence, so it’s safe for ME, but… “I want you to still be able to get through doors, so no, I’m not giving you every spell known.”
“Cowbird doesn’t have much trouble… but fine. I’ll set the stupid daemon free from her mind control. Here…” She casts a few times as I drop a Greater Arcane Sight on myself, and watch the Charm crumble after a few tries.
…and then Stan looks angry….
I'm known for having an invisible ship, so faking docking it isn't hard: I rent a shuttle bay, run an illusion of an invisible ship landing while I cycle the airlock, mark off a section with stanchions (you know,those poles you see at movie theaters, with fancy rope strung between them to organize lines... the ones I make come out neon pink, though) and associated stanchion rope (likewise) so it looks like I've marked off where the ship is located, then open the Keyhome in an appropriate place. After that, I go in, prepare credsticks for everyone, and lead them all out, handing each a credstick loaded with a thousand credits, calmly instructing each: “Please do not speak of what you saw in my ship; trade secrets and whatnot, I'd rather not have the information spread around.”
It mostly goes smoothly, although three people get a slight gleam in their eyes when they hear that… well, it's probably harmless if they spill what they saw (they saw the resulting structures, but not how I made them). Still, I do take note of the people that did, quietly grabbing pictures of them with my magic com unit.
That done…my current business at Absalom Station is largely concluded… but I do have effectively unlimited cargo space, and Absalom Station is a trade hub, which makes it excellent for picking up goods. Still… Stephanie will be giving birth to her twins soon, so they'll just be sitting in my hold until then.
Not that I have a shortage of space.
I do my normal buff routine for this, find a load of textiles, have invisible summoned creatures handle the loading, dismiss them, and head back to Stephanie, all nice and uneventful… an impression of which I'm disabused a few days into the Drift travel while I'm random-checking a summoned creature's work on thruster maintenance.
“Admiral,” Stephanie begins, letting me know this is official, “Someone on board is breathing.”
Cowbird and Linda technically still have biological functions, but the Cowbird has permanent shell of air (as do all of the summoned creatures I keep on board), while Linda doesn't need air at all thanks to buffs. So if Stephanie detected oxygen use in the life support… “We have a stowaway, then?”
“Yes Admiral, that's my conclusion as well.”
And this is a Huge ship, with individual cabins for fifty crew members, plus gateways to the others, engineering spaces, and many other hiding spots… wonderful, “Thanks. Please make a list of areas within yourself that you can't directly observe. How recent is the respiration?”
“The stowaway is definitely loose inside me, within the last few minutes.”
“Great. Initiate a lockdown, and let me know if any doors open. I'll organize a search….” as my ship hastens to comply, I get to work.
We already have fifty summons running around, with True Seeing, even. I just need to add a few buffs: Ironguard, to let them walk through the metallic walls on ship; Enable Function, to give them ten ranks in Perception; Acute Senses, to give them a thirty point bonus to Perception (although I need to fake this one via Limited Wish); Junk Armor so they're hard to hit (in case the boarder is hostile when found - also duplicated via Limited Wish). They're already pretty tough from earlier buffs, and now it's going to be very difficult to hide from them… which is the point.
Oh, and one other thing… “Stephanie, put me on the ship wide, please.”
“Yes Admiral,” she answers, “You’re live everywhere except here.”
I briefly buff up my skill check, “All hands, this is Fleet Admiral Alex Abrams,” I might as well play it up, the stowaway is my audience, “we have reason to believe we have a stowaway, which is why we have the ship locked down. We'll be conducting a systemic search shortly. Legitimate crew and passengers have nothing to fear,” not that we really have any passengers, “as for the stowaway: Yes, I know you're listening. This is my home territory. You WILL be caught and you are UTTERLY outgunned. The only question is whether I'll be in a good mood because you surrendered, or a bad one because I had to track you down.”
Yes, I'm rolling Intimidate. Seven ranks, twelve points of Charisma bonus, three points because Karmic Blessing makes it temporarily a class skill, fifteen points from Divine Insight, four from Greater Heroism, and a “natural” twenty from Surge of Fortune: I get a result of sixty one. To put this in perspective, an opponent for a twentieth level party would need a check of just forty five.
I use my magic com to tell Stephanie to cut the feed.
She obeys quickly: “Done, you're offline.”
“Now let's find out which spells were a waste of…”
“Admiral, you have a call on the ship's comm system,” Stephanie is quite helpful.
“Put the idiot through... to my com, please.” So the buffs oo the crew, then. Well… they don't hurt anything, and will still be there later.
“I'm sorry, Admiral,” the voice is… awful: It sounds like a thousand people screaming in pain, with any given person being silenced or permitted to scream, timed to make words, “but my lord… he was just SO convincing that I could make this work… steal your tech… but obviously not. I'm in crew cabin thirty nine at the moment… come get me.”
I pause a moment, “I'll be down shortly,” and cut off the com. As I walk, I ask Stephanie, “Can you see… him?... in crew cabin thirty nine?”
She answers quickly, “I can NOW, but I couldn't before. Maybe he has some form of invisibility to machines?”
There's a Technomancer spell for that: Invisibility to Technology, “That would do it, and would be a must-have for getting past most security in this day and age, wouldn't it? We were just outmaneuvered… until YOU detected he was on board. Do not tell him how we found out, please.”
“Yes Admiral,” she sounds happy.
We make our way down to the unused crew cabins, and turn into number thirty nine. It's nice, if a little small: An individual apartment (complete with kitchen, bedroom, living room, office, and bathroom - including a tub with jets) with a luxury finish at about seven hundred fifty square feet of floor space, and the same fake windows and skylights found elsewhere (projector units tied to the ship's sensor data to make the illusion of windows). Waiting for us in the living room? Our stowaway.
He is sitting on the couch. He has horns coming out of his forehead, curling back over his head through his ‘hair’, down behind his ears, back up in front of them, and then continuing around and around into a spiral that never seems to actually end. His hair? It's fire. No, not on fire, his hair itself is flickering red and orange flames atop his head, held in place as though it was professionally styled and gelled hair. His skin? A subtle pattern of various currency symbols in dark red on jet black… what little of it I can see, as he's wearing what looks like a silk business suit… dyed black, of course, with a dark red undershirt, a jet black tie (in a Windsor Knot), red silk gloves over his pointed claws, and highly polished black shoes (with dark red silk socks). He wears gold wristwatches (one on each wrist), and has diamond lapel pins. I avoid his eyes… because there's nothing there. Less than nothing: his eye sockets aren't just empty, they're a hungry darkness, actively pulling all the light inside and snuffing it out… and his soul is the bluest blue I've seen since I started seeing souls. Neon blue doesn't cover it: It's like he took the concept of ‘blue’, refined it to the purest blue possible, and then turned it up to eleven. And it is PERFECTLY aligned with his body. If I focus on his soul, I see every single detail of his flesh, like he's standing naked in front of me... but at least he's not 'excited'.
“Oh, that's because he's an Outsider,” Patricia explains, “He's made of refined soul essences. There is not one tiny spec of feminine nature in him. We only see masculine and feminine essence, but all of him will be lop-sided like that… he'll have a strong flavor, like licking sugar directly.”
Ah. Good to know… and while he's pretty obviously an evil outsider, I don't recognize his species, and that means he's pretty high up there in CR. This makes me nervous: If I don't know what he is, I don't know what he can do… and he is smiling like a used car salesman, which makes it worse. I'm not going to let that show, though. I send a note to Euler and Linda to get over here via my magic com unit. I don't want to face this guy down by myself.
Mostly because if I kill him, I'll level again, “So who are you, why are you here, who sent you, and what was the plan for after?”
“Call me Stan, I'm obviously not giving you my true name; I'm here because my lord made a good case I'd be able to steal your tech for our use. His name is…” he rattles off a dozen seemingly-random syllables….
“Did you catch that?” I send to Stephanie over my interface-free magic com.
“Every syllable,” she sends back.
“...but please don't tell him who told you. And I have some armor packed away in a null space chamber with a Drift Escape Module. I was to put that on and activate it once I'd secured a data module that had your technology's details on it,” he sighs, “but none of these three ships of yours with their weird link-ups seem to have any information on how you do it.”
“Of course not, “ I buff up and lie, “Those are on my research base in The Drift; I'm not crazy enough to drag the secrets around with me. Your mission was doomed from the start.”
“That's a pity…” as he's saying this, my Sense Motive skill picks up on something: This guy is Charmed.
And that's when Euler arrives, Linda in tow.
Euler takes one look at the evil beast and asks me verbally, “Why are you bothering with an Adikodaemon trapped by a Charm Monster spell?” Right, Euler is buffed sky-high, and has a lot of skill points to boot.
Linda laughs, “He is hilariously far beneath you, my goddess. Please allow me to kill him for you: There's no reason to soil your hands.”
Stan seems to be a little slow on the uptake… but he IS mind-controlled, “Goddess… CHARMED?! ME?!?!”
I sigh, “I have some abilities commonly associated with deities, and yes, your mind isn’t your own,” I turn to Euler, deliberately not naming her, “Do you know Dispel Magic?”
“No, I haven't figured that one out.”
“That's easily solved, if you don't mind a slightly larger chest. Here…” I reach over, holding an Enable Function spell for Euler, to grant her the Expanded Arcana feat, which in turn will grant her Dispel Magic.
“More spells and bigger guns?” she leans into my hand, so that her bosom makes contact, and I feel her chest swell slightly as the spell takes hold… and her tap stiffens under my hand, “How can I say no? Can you give me the entire library?”
She doesn’t have any more essence, so it’s safe for ME, but… “I want you to still be able to get through doors, so no, I’m not giving you every spell known.”
“Cowbird doesn’t have much trouble… but fine. I’ll set the stupid daemon free from her mind control. Here…” She casts a few times as I drop a Greater Arcane Sight on myself, and watch the Charm crumble after a few tries.
…and then Stan looks angry….
