Weird Adventures In Space #5

Welcome everybody to episode five of Weird Adventures in Space, the SHU Science Fiction Real Play Superhero Podcast following a team of refugee aliens fighting interstellar capitalism and solving the mysteries of the Milky Way. My name is Jay and I will be your GM, that's short for Game Something and the rest you can figure out yourself. This is a real play show which means we play in the Fate System, we roll dice and then I cut out most of the dice rolling to make me sound good. I'm gonna go ahead and let the cast introduce themselves.

Hi, I'm your Giselle, I'm here to roll dice and kick ass. And you're all out of ass. Exactly. I'm Logan and I guess we'll see what happens on this episode.

Last episode was a trip. I'm Rob, I'm playing Shomp and I think I'm just gonna be looking out for Linda pentably. I was actually playing Arlu, I'm currently wondering if she's gonna be more pissed off now that Kita has a shirt back on. I mean I know I'm pissed about it.

I'm Tony, I play Greg and Greg's most likely probably gonna try to make the inconsistencies more consistent and inefficiencies more efficient. That's how we get things done. This man's brain is an ocean manual. That is the cast and we have a little bit of moving around to do.

After all, there's a mystery on Mars. Go ahead and strap in for episode 5 of Weird Adventures in Space. My plug is an alien. The episode opens in an operating room, about 12 hours from where episode 4 ended.

The train fell out of the wormhole between time and space, onto Mars and although a lot of people were banged and bruised, most were okay. Most. With one notable exception. The supervillain known as Mr.

Matter from the future, who traveled through the wormhole, was not safely inside the train traveling through time and in the process has had over 90% of the skin on his body melted off by cosmic radiation. In this operating room, Dr. Dudad, the chief attending physician of the Union of Heroes, is in the 12th hour of surgery. Mr.

Matter being locked inside a surgical matrix. While the other villain that you brought with you to the future, El Bido, the one who actually was willing to put himself on the line to help everybody get back home, is working with Dr. Dudad, siphoning that radiation off of Mr. As she grafts new stem cell printed skin onto his body.

It's a 12 hour operation and it's going poorly. She's had to take segments of power from the hospital, the internet, the communicator lines down just so she can try to keep this poor soul alive. And the rest of you are watching. Maybe not directly.

Maybe not staring intently. But nearby. While all of this is going down because it's dangerous. You don't know what will happen if this guy dies.

As you're sitting there looking at each other, the beacon enters the room, chief safety officer of the Red Hills Colony you live on. And he says to you, Arlu, Wayfarer, and Kita, broadly to the room. So what are we going to do about them? What do you do about who?

Well, you've got a brainwashed psychopath with cosmic powers on the operating table and a completely unhinged man helping with the surgery. After talking to people it was my understanding that Albedo got you in this situation in the first place, Sir Mater is trying to kill you. So what do we do? What do we do?

Do we build a prison on Mars? Do we take them back to Earth? What's the right thing to do here? That's a very hard question to answer.

But yeah, what do you think? Would we even have anything to be able to contain either of them on here? The beacon kind of looks pensively and says we've had to build custom things in the past, but lucky for us, the person who builds all the custom things is right there. Any points in the operating room?

I don't know that I look at them and see Gail in their future. I guess the Albedo guy did certainly get us into the situation in the first place, but he also got us out and he's also helping right now. And the guy on the operating table frankly hasn't been himself for many years. Albedo didn't hurt anybody permanently, did he?

He did not hurt anybody permanently other than himself and the orcs that Kita fucked up. Although I will say the Jitayan orcs have regeneration features, so nobody really died or anything. He gave me a pretty good smack to the back of the head, but... The beacon says I guess Kita really is a matter of what you saw and what you did there because no one else was on that train other than Greg.

And I have a feeling Greg's gonna be putting out fires for months. Nobody got hurt, obviously Mr. Matter here. Well, I guess if I hurt you mean dead, but I'm pretty sure you were all dragged into the future comes with its own consequences.

And by the way, we're out of train so we can't get back to Earth safely. Of course there were consequences. The question is whether or not being criminal, being violent, being greedy, terrorizing other people for your own personal gain, what do we do about that in this town? If we're not gonna cops and we're not gonna have military, we're just here to keep people safe.

And where do you put someone that can blow up the Earth with a thought? Rehabilitation is my thought. I know that our past goes back aways, but you probably know like I do in certain social circles what we did in World War II makes us work criminals. I feel like the entire thing that I've been doing in the last couple of years is trying to give back and make up for some of that.

I'm not saying that either of these two guys are gonna be good or not go out and try to hurt people again, but I think just calling them bad and putting them into jail doesn't really do anything except give them another reason to hate us. They're trying to hurt us. Can't necessarily make up for your mistakes as a jail cell. Well, maybe the point isn't to make up for those mistakes, but it's to keep people safe.

For how long? So one of these guys gets out of their enclosures and they go after people again and they've got a big chip on their shoulders at them around? That's a good point. I mean, I'm looking at Albedo right now and you don't have to do that.

He doesn't have to do that. Did anything happen to him? Did any of you talk to him? Maybe he had a change of heart, you know, who knows?

That future was kind of fucked up. Waifur was with him the whole time, weren't you? He was, and you know what, Greg and I let him have it. He was bitching about the whole thing and we turned around and just told him that it was his fault that he was there and he actually showed up and kind of listened.

The beacon takes a big long sigh and says, I've been alive for 98 years. 98 years on Earth. I've never seen a prison too much good. But at the same time, you don't go out there and talk to these people that live here on Mars.

You don't. You just don't. And I know that because I talk to them. I do this re-walkin.

They're scared. They... I think they're starting to believe that anything could happen out here and as exciting as that means for building a future together, it's not good for the people that have to live through it day to day. Right.

Do you want to have a structure? You want to have something to believe and you want to have something that's going to keep you safe? But I don't know that any of us are really equipped to just give that to them, you know? Yeah.

That makes sense. Um, maybe we need to sit on this. Give us some time. Obviously there's no urgency.

It's not like we can go anywhere. The key to early you're standing here too. I'm wondering why we didn't already have a jail built before we needed one. The beacon looks at you and says, because we agreed not to.

Well, it looks like it was a great decision, wasn't it? I believe it's an important decision because if we're walking around with these sort of incredible miraculous powers and we're surrounded by normal people who can't defend themselves from these incredible miraculous powers, then maybe safety needs to be on us. And safety as we're talking about, doesn't always come into jail cell. The union has a prison for high intensity threats, but I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about it.

So we're concerned about superheroes, but we're like, let's not have somewhere to put them? Yeah. There has to be a bigger solution than locking them up. The unions believe that for years.

And I do too. Do you know how many arch nemeses I've had that got old and made amends on their deathbed? It happens. So the beacon takes a deep breath and says, I got someone I want to introduce you to.

Wayfarer, will you come with me? Sure. And the beacon takes wayfarer out of the room. And it's just a key to our loose in there watching surgery.

You got any popcorn? Not at the moment, no. I'm gonna go get some. Alright.

I should probably check on Constance. Here we'd probably head out towards the nursery. As you walk out of this medical facility, as soon as you set out of the front door, all eight of those Jotan bikers come up to you. And they stop you.

They put their hand out and they're like, hey, we thought? Sure. What's up? We did a lot of bad stupid shit to you.

And? And we're stuck here. And you ain't like killing us or anything. Why would I?

I don't know. Why wouldn't you? You beat us right? You could.

Didn't I offer you guys to help? Sure. We guess we're reporting for duty. Right now, I think you guys should probably get settled in because with the train down, we're not getting anywhere anytime soon.

I can show you guys to some dormitories. You guys can get rested up. I feel like that. We mean dormitories.

Like a building? We sleep under the stars. If you guys want to, that's fine. Yeah, absolutely.

Alright. So, uh, we'll see you back here, please. Alright. Guys, know where it is.

We'll figure it out. Alright. You look like you got business, boss, man. Shamans been 12 hours since the train has landed.

Where have you been? You were greeted by Isney, the beacon, and Dr. Dudad. They all kind of filled you in that there was a bunch of stuff happening and then all split off into various directions.

I've probably gone back home to start working through the book that I got. Oh. Try to get some insight into how is it written? Is it in order or is it just as the other sham, sort of remembered things he added them?

So, you were given a book by the sham of the future and pulled through a study that affixed what happened to his future. The book is relatively unorganized, but it does seem chronological. Jama isn't writing in fully structured sentences or in some cases even a language you understand. Although you have seen it before, it's the Sanne day language.

It's just not one you're ever familiar with. But he goes back and forth between that and common. And what you were able to find is essentially that this is like a 600 page notebook where every individual line is filled. There's a lot to get through.

Are you looking for anything in particular? Time and severity of the next attack. Can you make me a lore role? Don't have lore, sorry.

But I got plus three in the dice. Hell yeah. You are fully aware of this thing that exists out in the Solar System that is never quite needed to Earth. It's this weird astrological phenomenon known as Quasar Prism.

A Quasar Prism is a mineral that seems to contain enough energy to power an entire fleet of starships. And you know that when some organization spots a prism, it is a blood war over to see who gets it. He has in this book that Ryor is securing prisms from the Milky Way and tells you to cut that supply off. Are there any locations of these prisms in the book?

Can you make me an investigation? Not a candidate. That is a plus one. You are able to find on the same page as you found the information about the crystals some set of coordinates.

You're not exactly sure what they are. They seem to be spaceship flying related coordinates, they're not just random numbers. But you can't quite interpret all of the numbers yet. It seems like you have part of it and in the other part of it you don't quite remember what that symbol means.

It could be a seven, it could be a three who knows. But it does seem to be a very specific set of coordinates like 64 digit numbers and something like that. Do we have any contact with the Union of Heroes tool there, Ace? Yeah, absolutely.

You can just beep in with your communicator actually. Okay, I'd like to get in touch with is it network? Yeah, network speaking. What's up?

Where did it go? Hi, network. It's Sean from Red Hills. Oh yeah, Mars, Mars, what's up?

Yeah, I've got these maybe coordinates. I was wondering if you could give me a hand in interpreting them. Yeah, sure. Can you send me a photo?

Yeah, and I'll ping that over. I'll take a look at them. Well, that doesn't look familiar to me, but I don't speak any language either because I'm from Earth. I'm not sure if you're special, but you can talk to them.

They're on the Union's role, the ledger. Probably only be able to get them via phone, but you know what I mean. Yeah, anyone you know, that would be great. Diving into Professor Perfect right now.

Send that phone call through and it takes like 12 rings before it gets picked up. And a very old band enters the phone and says, Hello, this is the Union or are we on an adventure? Hello, is that Professor Perfect? The one and only or rather the fourth and only Professor Perfect the fourth.

Hi, this is Sean from the Mars, only. Oh yeah, cool. Yeah, I've come across something I think are coordinates, but I can't quite translate them. Network said that you might be able to help.

Fascinating coordinates, where to? I guess that's what you're trying to figure out. Yes. Okay, it's all coming together.

Yeah, could you send me a picture? And I send that over. You spend five minutes walking him through how to look at a picture on a phone. And then he says, Oh wow, this is the Sananday language.

Extinct people that they went out a long time ago. There's only fine this in runes and records. Professor Perfect, can you translate it? Can you help us find these coordinates and maybe we can find out what's there?

I've got a cipher somewhere around here. And if you can give me a few hours to dig it up, I think I should be able to figure it out. You know what? That sounds perfect.

Splendid, I'll get to it immediately. Yeah, and I'll hang up there. Okay, right before you hang up, he goes, incredible! You've got the phone in your lap and you're looking at this notebook.

There's a knock at the door. I will go on to the door. Outside of the door, you see a five-foot-pole stock of celery, essentially, a very pale-green type of person, but their body is rigid and you can see through it. So imagine a humanoid made out of see-through-green and a giant eyeball.

This person comes to your door and says, are you Sean? Yes, can I help? Yeah, I'm really sorry to bother you, but I don't know who else to talk to. I haven't seen my son in three days, and I don't know where he went.

I see everyone else running around and helping and stuff, but they're fighting demons or melting things. That sort of thing isn't for everyone, I understand. I feel like it would be a burden or a bother or something, and if I feel terrible, if I hurt so many people, just because I was selfish, but that's my boy. I don't know where he is, and I don't know where he went.

Okay, I can help. Where did you last see him? Well, I last saw him at home, but then I talked to his friend, Rijo, and Rijo, said he went to this bistro for breakfast, and then I think that's it. I haven't heard anything since.

Okay, I guess the bistro is the best place to start. Let's head there. Wait, does that mean you're helping me? Of course.

I wouldn't tell you. I don't know. Maybe you don't know how to do this kind of thing. Maybe I should.

Maybe I can, I don't know. I'm happy to help, and yeah, I know it's like to have lost loved ones. Let's just hope that we can find your son. Thank you.

I'm your neighbor, by the way. I just live next door, and if you ever need me, I'm right there. Okay? Just like whatever.

I'll make you food. Thanks. I'd appreciate that. I'm gonna go back home.

Thank you. I'm really terrified, but I'm glad to know someone's helping. All right, take care. She stumbles back to her house.

I'm gonna head down to the bistro that she mentioned. This is about like three or four blocks down the road. On the walk there, you pass by just, you know, kids playing on the street and people bitch about the news. Normal folks stuff.

You eventually get down to the bistro, which is boppin. It's really, really busy. And although there's no real money or financial transactions system here on Red Hills, they'll exchange like five minutes of work for three pounds of food. So all the kids show up right in early and watch like six dishes and then eat until he gets sick.

And you can see that happening right now as you speak. There's a bunch of like, unruly teens just eating a shitload of pancakes everywhere. Is there anyone who looks like they would actually be employed there rather than just helping out for food? Yeah, for sure.

There are people running around and putting dishes on tables and cooks and that sort of thing. Right. I'd like to approach one of the service. You approach a enormous dinosaur looking man, just basically humanoid with a dinosaur head.

He's wearing a little name tag that says his name is Bo. And he says, Hey, Sean, what's up? And what time you'll see? Yeah, I've been a bit busy.

In fact, I'm in the middle of something right now. Whoa. Yeah. A few days ago, there was a kid and I give a description of the.

The people. Bo gets it. He immediately knows what you're talking about. Yeah.

I heard he was here. He seems to gone missing. Did you do you know anyone who saw him? You're talking about Tommy.

Tommy was here a couple days ago, but he went out in the back with a couple guys and I don't know if he came back in. What's up, guys? Well, just like a couple of his friends and one of the guys that works there, he points out another guy that is also a celery men with an eyeball for a head except his eyeball is completely bloodshot. He goes that, you know, that's kid kid works here, but you know, everybody just kind of.

They know he's kind of into some shit. You know what I mean? Yeah. Okay.

Well, thanks Bo. I think I need to have a word. Yeah, sounds good. You want a bunch of pancakes, man?

Rain check. Yeah, I'll write down a rain check for you. Kids sitting there leaning on the countertop going, Hey, Sean, what's up? Okay.

Not much. I was speaking to Tommy's mother a little while ago. She hasn't seen him in a few days. So sad.

You were here with him a few days ago, right? I mean, on your every day. Yes, but specifically with Tommy a few days ago. Yeah, I think so.

He comes to society sometimes. I don't know. He's cool. Yeah.

So do you know what? Very much gone after he was here. Oh, well, wait, you're going to cooperate. No, I'm just someone who lives and works here.

Okay. Tommy's getting high in the alley. And sometimes those guys do that. They come here sometimes they buy for me or whatever, but it's the teenagers, man.

Okay. So we was in the alley and then we didn't see him. I didn't go out to the alley with him. I just, you know, if they want to buy something from me, I slide under the table and go back to work.

Unless like you're looking to buy. No, thanks. All right. Well, thanks for the help.

And I'm sure you're around. Yeah, look, man, I'm not happy to know that Tommy's missing. Do you want to go like look at the alley or something? We'll lay back there.

It's not a big deal. Have a look around. Greg, you've been home about 12 hours. Man, I'm just trying to get a big, you know, nice nap in.

Feeling pretty well rested. Fully work. Yeah. You kind of rolled out of bed, of course, to like nine million emails.

Oh, it's every day with these emails. Hey, I try to chip them down. And then you got to like read them all. And sometimes like the people they don't put what they want in the subject.

They just go question. Well, I know it's a question. You want to email me if you didn't have a question. It's like extra clicks and then you missed a thing.

Check the spam folder. How do emails? Most of your emails seem to be support tickets from people looking for help from that van co or, you know, some internal document that needs to be fulfilled. So a lot of them are, you know, something Senate 10 o'clock that says we needs this.

And then by two o'clock it says, thanks. We have it now. That kind of shit. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I still got to scan it. I'll make sure everything's going, you know, if you're scanning it all, you notice one consistent thing that happened while you were gone. It doesn't seem to go away and keeps getting reported, which is residents of Red Hills contacting in Van Co to say that their house had been swallowed up by a sinkhole.

Oh, multiple houses or is it a few houses or at least four houses and multiple other sinkholes. And they're not consistent. They're kind of just all over the place. Luckily, they weren't sudden, right?

People are able to get out as their house is creaking. But multiple sinkholes, but on the same area. But I'm going to, I guess I got to head out there and get my couple four minutes and go, go see what's causing that. You can do that without having to do anything on camera.

So you hop into Rover, who is your Mars Rover with a dog AI in it. The dog says, it's really nice to see you again. Greg, where are we going today? We're going to head to Red Hills there.

All right. I heard you over talking about that sinkhole problem. You mean, okay? Is that where we're going?

Yeah, we got to go check that out. See what's up. Stop it. Fix it.

Fill them up. You know, something. Well, then you should know I'm fully road trained and tested to go down and investigate sinkholes. I can drive on the wall.

I have parachute. I can do whatever you need. Oh, that's good. All right.

Well, in that case, I make sure we got the cameras and for red, you know, the depth ones that kind of see through. I don't know the, you know, with the density of the soils and stuff like that. We got that on board. We'll figure that out.

I'm great at soil density. Moisture, moisture meters. I know how moist it is at all times. Outstanding.

Well, let's get down there for another one. Sinks. So that's good. And Rover takes off down the trails.

It takes you all five minutes to get there. Like I said, Red Hills ain't that big yet. And what you see is there's, I would say suburbs because of the towns that big yet, but these sort of like, Exerve residential homes that are just kind of being built on open air as new people come in. This is one of those neighborhoods that hasn't been filled up with houses yet.

Right? It's like a building development, but you just kind of build as neat. I see like a finished thing here, a partial finished thing there, a big bunch of blank lots over there. You got it.

So it looks like there are a bunch of sinkholes that weren't targeted at houses specifically as you're driving through. It's not like a perfect shape or anything. It's one person's backyard collapsed. It's this half of half built construction project fell apart.

There's also several fields of open space with a bunch of sinkholes as well. Okay. I guess the first question is determined if it's, yeah, if it's intentional or not. So I guess if we could head down into one of the ones that's that a house didn't get swallowed up in and go see what's in there.

Well, you can meet one of the foremen at the biggest one. It's not near house and the event performance has to get out of the Rover. You know, we can't really figure out if these are intentional or not, but Greg check this out and he picks something up to you and shows it to you. It's a comic book.

But it's written in a language you've never seen before. And it seems to be depicting instead of humans, bright green humanoids with four eyes instead of two. Okay. Well, what are the if I can't read the words I'm looking at the pictures.

What are the pictures showing them doing? It seems like it's just a typical superhero comic book for young adolescent kids. You know, there's a bad guy that shows up and the before I'd ban has a problem and then he beats up the bad guy. All right.

This thing was down in the hole. He said we found this down in one of the most shallow sinkholes. We're not going to venture to go into the bigger ones, but this is the biggest one. If you're going to be diving.

It's probably safest. This thing looked new. Like it just was put there. Like it was been down there and was uncovered when the sinkhole sunk.

It looks like it is new or like the pages are fresh or whatever, but it looks like it has major playboy left in the woods vibes. Just kind of little musty and gross, but maybe like recently used. All right. Well, I mean, if you don't want to go down, I'm whole somebody's got to.

So I find another willing foreman ask him hop and Rover will go down here. The foreman says we were actually here to operate an emergency winch system. Would you like us to get a second to go along with you? That way we can winch out if something goes wrong.

Yeah, of course. I guess get somebody else down here. If I'm going down there, I wouldn't mind having two people man in this winch thing. Sure, sure.

Eventually a third employee shows up and he's like a how would you call a subterranean expert or something like that? He's dug before he's been in mines. He's worked this kind of stuff before. So he can answer any questions you might have.

His name is Greg. No, damn it. I like this guy. His name is Benny.

All right, Benny. Greg's nice to me. We never got to work with you before. We going down?

Yeah, hop in. Let's get down here. Rover here is going to guide the way. You're the expert on the soil thing.

So just, you know, if you see something important, or you think significant, you just let me know. Yeah, look, I'm all eyes out ready for it. And then Rover does the transformers thing where the car door turns into a thing that's not a car door. And it essentially creates a parachute for you to softly glide down the sinkhole.

As you glide through slowly and slowly, the soil in the wall begins to be replaced by enormous green gemstones, like a crystal cave. This is about 100 feet, 200 feet down. So you would be able to see it from looking down at the sinkhole. Okay, we have received this before.

But what is this? This is new to me. We've never done any real drilling or mining of Mars yet, Greg. So it's all news to me.

I don't have to tell you, but I'm thinking samples, right? Oh, believe me, we're going to be getting some samples, but we should probably do it when we know what we're dealing with. God only knows how long the sinkhole is. Exactly.

Okay. You eventually land. And what you see is an immaculately built tunnel, like a subway tunnel. It's maybe 20 feet wide.

You can walk through it. There's beautiful artwork on the walls. Big murals. And Benny looks at you and goes, Greg, we are not the first people here.

Apparently not. This is elaborate. Yeah, I didn't learn about this in the rock class. Do we keep going?

Yeah, I guess so. I guess we'll head down the biggest tunnel, I suppose. See what else we find. There's nothing else in here but just the tunnel.

There's no there's no shacks or buildings or no. No, no, no. You look like you crushed into the fine art gallery of a museum. Like it's very fancy.

It's very well made and it's a very enclosed space. But there's no objects at all. There's no pipes, wires. No, just a tunnel.

So are you driving down or walking down? I suppose we could walk it if Rover just wants to slow roll it behind us. If we want to stop and investigate something a little closer, it would have to keep hopping in and out, hopping in and out. Yeah.

And if you slow down, Benny gets a chance to take a bunch of samples. That's kind of what I was thinking. And as you're sort of stumbling down there, you eventually see a small figure in the distance. Oh boy.

As that figure keeps approaching, you can hear someone go, oh, hey. And then waves at you. Huh. So they're friendly, right?

So I got a waving yell bag. Hey, hey, the closer he approaches. You can see he's also one of these human weights with green skin and fore eyes. Like in a comic book.

He looks like he's dressed in like a basic workman's outfit. He's got like a hard hat on. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's an alien hard hat.

But you know, you know hard hat when you see one. Oh, yeah. He's eventually about 200 feet away from you. He seems to be walking very slowly and just waving.

I'll give you some chance to react if you want to do anything. Well, I guess I'll just keep walking towards these seems friendly. It's just one guy waving young. Hey, I was going to keep walking towards him.

Sure. Once he gets up right in front. Yeah, he goes. Well, hey, yeah.

Hey, what. I was going to keep walking towards him. Sure. Once he gets up right in front of you.

He goes. I was going, it's going pretty good. I was going with you. Could be better.

Yeah. I noticed maybe you had accident there or something. I mean, I hate to tell you that it was your fault or anything. The Lord only knows.

But I'm glad safe. Yeah. What do you mean? I had accident?

Well, I'd seems like you fell down. No, we came down here. We didn't fall. What?

Really? Yeah. When did I? Yeah, we just we just floated down here on the vehicle back there.

See what's going on down here. Well, you know, the folks who are in charge of this place a lot, they like to keep the top world is out of here, you know, and this kind of tunnel is built for it. But at the same time, well, I get it. The problem is we got you got your your tunnels kind of encroaching on our upper thing.

You got your you got your chocolate and our peanut butter or we got our peanut butter and your chocolate. So that's what we're down here to figure out. Oh, no, I think you misunderstand, sir. I am not worried about it.

I'm only concerned that it's an engineering failure on our band. It's meant to be disguised. You're meant to not be able to see it. And if something happened to you, well, I would hate for our shoddy worksmanship to put someone in harm.

Well, you know, I could say the same thing. We what we're doing up there. We didn't mean to cause any intentional mishaps. So I guess that's what just trying to figure out.

I don't really like, you know, throwing blame around if you guys are got a thing going on. Kind of curious what exactly it is you're doing down here. This is this is kind of spectacular. Well, I got to say, thank you, you know, from from one craftsman to it appears another craftsman yourself.

I appreciate that you can see this kind of work and see it as a learning experience and maybe opportunity for us to get to know each other as opposed to some sort of conflict. I don't like conflict either. You know what? I'd like to introduce myself.

My name is Grog. I'm the King of Mars. All right. I like this guy.

Wait, you're talking to a side room by the beacon and the lights are still flicking on and off from due to that surgery. But the beacon goes, oh, I got something for you, bud. Okay, what's up? We got a new union recruit and she wanted to live on Mars.

Okay. Can't tell you why. Seems just nice, normal young lady who could have a whole life ahead of her, but maybe she'll make something out of it. I just want to know, you know, what do we do when humans want to come live here?

Are we in charge of them? I don't know. I don't know if we can say that we're in charge of them, but I think that we should definitely talk to each other if we're going to be inhabiting this in place of turn to do. Take care of the same people.

You got to go ahead on your shoulders now. Then he introduces you into the room and you see Carrie. Hi. Hi.

Also known as her superhero identity Lotus. Correct. And actually, way fair, no sir. That's true.

But could you give the camera a description of your character? Carrie is five foot five. She is white with like bright orange hair that is just the biggest frizz and because she stopped cutting it while she was lost in space for quite some time. It is about down to the middle of her back.

She has really bright yellow eyes and her left arm is entirely made out of crystal. Cough entirely entirely like from the base of her clavicle all the way down to her fingertips. It is usually like this kind of soft blue color. But you're just sitting there in the room.

The beacon told you to hold up a second or while he grabbed me fairs to talk. You just got here a little while ago on an union starship. But because the train was out of order, it took you like eight weeks to actually get here. Beacon says Carrie came to us recently while while we were gone and was just interested in in back in the game.

Carrie. I don't know how the hell you got here without a train, but some dedication to do so. Mostly then. I guess I'm surprised to see you because I thought that you were one of the people that had disappeared after the whole God-war thing.

I thought I was dead. I never made it through the portal. I ended up just kind of drifting backwards. I saw a US and obscurity get through.

Please tell me he's dead. I really didn't like him. I lost a lot of people that did like I'd like to know that there's like one last jackass in the world. I don't know.

We have so many people that are like, am I a things that have been bad? Like I'm I'm in space and I don't really want to be. But that's how bad it is. So I'm here.

Anyways, if you're here to help, like I think we're all glad to have you and we could definitely stand to have extra help. The last couple of weeks, let me tell you bad. So we're help good. Yeah.

We're glad to see ya. Yeah, I don't really know what else to do at this point. There's not really anything waiting for me on earth. Did you happen to see a guy in a white morph suit with like a bunch of equal decals?

Can't say that I have. That seems like a thing I'd remember. I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask. Well, you know, there's all sorts of people here.

I found that it's a great place to be. So maybe you get a chance to make something new for yourself here. Who knows? Maybe.

Maybe. At the very least, we'll be helping people. Yeah, I guess I don't really know how to do anymore. And I don't know if I really do that all that well.

The union has a really good therapy program and my sister needs that more than anything. It's a tough place to be. Yep. So what do you don't really know if there's muggings?

I don't know. Should we like introduce her to the rest of the gang? We could do that. I didn't have something else though.

That might be a little more fun. And the beacon reaches into his ice cream suit and he pulls out an envelope. And out of the envelope, he pulls out a bunch of tickets and he says, this is the first ever hockey game in Mars tonight. What?

They built a rink while you were going. So this fledgling nation has a hockey team. You got it. That's football.

That's soccer. Hockey. That makes sense. Kind of.

You got ice everywhere. They're doing this big PR thing. There's going to be a big press conference and everything. More players have been trapped here since the train went out.

It'll probably be something we need to be there for safeties sake anyway. OK. Where are they playing? If it's the first ever game, it's actually Amberville.

Damn it. Our new surgery is wrapping up and you get the equivalent of a really obnoxious ringtone in the back of your head. Great. From the Council of Elders.

Can I put it to like silent? No. Damn. I'm going to pretend like I don't hear it until this surgery is over.

You know, he went to check on Constance. The baby Constance. I'll check on her and maybe put it there for a little bit. And then probably if nothing happens, just head home so we can get some sleep or relax or something.

The kid is doing great. They're just kind of aging normally. The attender does ask you if you're going to the hockey game tonight. The what?

The hockey game. It's going to be the hockey game. What's hockey? It's a sport.

I can't. I might check it out. We're going to be like thousands of people there, man. There's thousands of people on Mars.

So right. And they're all going to the game hockey game. So it isn't a small town. You just you go to whatever's happening.

Yes, I'll check it out. She gives instructions and she talks about how she thinks that the Martian team is actually really well positioned to pick up the win. And then eventually, you know, you do the small talk and you walk on it. You say, I'm back home.

Yeah. Keto wants to check on his project, see how far along that's come because that would help. The Jatans are on your lawn. And it seems like they're just like punching each other for fun, rough housing.

A couple of them have discovered beer. There's one guy who took a lawn chair out of your garage. That's fine as long as they don't touch anything important. As I see you walking in there like, hey, man, you can tell me it's so cool here.

Didn't know what you guys would like. So this is fucking cool. All right. What's that big thing you got in your garage?

That is a spaceship that I have been working on. What really? Yeah. Our last one kind of got kind of cosied into us.

So I've been trying to rebuild it based on what I know. We all work on our bikes. If you want help. Any help would be appreciated.

Yeah, man. And the guy who's holding up the beer goes, yeah, man. And then all of them scream it. And they all kind of like file into your garage.

What would you like to do for the next couple of years? You got to rush for works. Yeah. He'll give him a quick tour of the park is to and just kind of give him the rundown of what he wants done, what has been done, what needs to be done.

See if they can provide any help that he wouldn't have been able to do. Yeah, actually, they help you with some of the things where you had like some knowledge gaps, even though it takes them maybe longer than average to describe it because they're trying to describe it in terms of fighting the engine. It's a little confusing, but you eventually do kind of get there and you realize that these guys are just kind of, they're not bad or mean. They're just wild, right?

They're just not used to living around people. Sean, you go into the alleyway behind the beast room. It's dirty. And there are three guys there all in like oversized hoodies and jeans.