We had 3 sessions since the last post. Notes for all three sessions need to be posted yet but, sadly, the final session ended like this:

The crew of the Sherwood knew that Trinket was an empath and had an unusual connection to the xenomorphs. However, once the crew brought their explosive cargo into close proximity to the hive, Trinket seemed to lose control and sprinted directly into the heart of the hive.

The Crew caught up to Trinket amongst a field of eggs surrounding a pulsing spire of alien technology. Suddenly, a xenomirph soldier leapt down and tried to snatch the kid up. Opening fire, armor piercing rounds cut xenomorph and eggs to ribbons while Ava, the synthetic, attempted to grab Trinket. The sound of gun fire drew more xenomorphs just as the Weyland Yutani commandos came storming into the room.

Chaos ensued as crew, commandos, and xenomorphs attacked in a whirlwind of death. Seeing several aliens descending just above the WY commandos, Lance fired a grenade into the mass, showering many with acid blood. At that moment, the xenomorph queen burst into view and made straight for trinket. By this point, Trinket managed to break the queen’s hold on her mind and began to panic. Ava did her best to pull the shrieking child away but was torn to pieces, sending white lubricant spaying, by the queen.

Meanwhile, the WY commandos lost their bid to capture the queen (and their lives) in a storm of aliens and acid. In the growing confusion, marshal Maddox was finally able to free Trinket and hand her off to a colonial marine. As the marine ran for the exit, the queen impaled Maddox with her tail and began to pursue. With the marshal’s body flopping behind, the queen charged crushing underfoot Fin, Lance, and Clemment, killing them all.

With nearly the entire crew dead Mari dropped her smartgun, grasped the detonator to their tactical nuke and ended the bug hunt.

7/4/21

There are 2 exits in the room, something is coming at us from NE, we go East. A weird slithering noise with hissing comes our way. Ground is moist, foot falls in soupy puddles. Tunnel is very rough, lots of debris on the ground. Puddles is blood mixed with dirt. Passage Y’s off, we go left, Trinket stops, Ava stops, Maddox runs into her, Trinket says “they” stopped too. This used to be a high traffic area, there’s metal grating under all the debris.

Motion tracker shows nothing, we go left, lots of ceiling collapse there. We find an actual structure, pressure door has been ripped off. Bits of body parts by the opening. Probably an explosion + acidic scoring on walls. There is no power to open doors, so Dozer opens right one with his jack. Smeared blood and a body. Roger shoots it once. Roger goes in, crates are covered with dust.

The body is likely a member of security forces, there’s a tag on shirt that says Armstrong, a holster but no gun. Another crate has all basic mining stuff in it. We go to the room across the hallway. Large chamber, pieces of the generator. Likely damaged during the fighting. Will need parts to run again. More crates, blasting caps, pogo sticks that shoot explosive spikes. Next room is storage area, very old crates. More stuff covered in dust. There’s an office of some kind.

There’s a 6wheeler vehicle in the back and we find some generator parts. Garage door in the back is too heavy to open with a jack. Dozer tries to repair the generator. Gonna take a few hours. Maddox repairs himself. Finn checks out the vehicle. A facehugger rushes some people but gets blown away. There are more pings on the tracker coming toward us about 2h later. We stack crates to block tunnels.

The pings seem to go around the back door. DOzer, Maddox and Ginnis open the jammed door, there’s a guy in there who wants water. There’s thumping in the back, whine of metal as it buckles. The 3 try to close the jammed door again. Door is brought down to 1 foot from the ground. There are hissing noises. We take defense positions. Trinket says something isn’t right. Heavy footsteps coming toward the jammed door.

Roger looks under the door, massive foot and leg is visible. Fires the explosive spike thing into that room. Door buckles and there’s a high pitch squeal. Tracker picks up a lot of pings outside, total of 10. A bunch of aliens rush us. Mr Ginnis gets his head blasted clean through. Dead. Trinket keeps saying something is wrong, something is wrong about the guy we found that wants water. McWard gets hurt bad, guts hanging out and shit.

We roll out in the 6wheeler, we reach a fissure. Fine ash covering a winching system. Trinket is in some kind of daze. She says this is very old. Maddox goes down the abyss first. Gets to an enormous cavern. See sa ship that crashes into a structure. Hard to tell how big it is. Ship is curved, dome-like on top, lost in the crash maybe. Strange to see a ship miles underground..

Kit and Roger go down the rope. Dozer goes down as well. Trinket says this place is very old. Like the stone has formed over the ship and structure hundreds or thousands of years ago. Probably the aliens’ ride. Everyone goes down except McWard and Finn. Doorways are 12ft tall, and they’re entering a city that the ship crashed into. Trinket says “they wanted us to come here.”

There’s a very thick blanket of dust, Roger makes a mess of it. Finds 3 bodies, one probably stood 9ft tall, craddling 2 more bodies. Both chests on woman and child are burst open, bodies fossilized. Trinket says the are waiting for us, she is in there. McWard goes down as well, only Finn stays in the 6wheeler.

6/6/21

Ruby needs a couple hours to back up data and gather samples. Maddox tries to help Ava with her codes. Slow process to back off safely, her abilities might be affected for a bit.

There’s another less known entrance to mines on observation deck on Lv3, narrow path so more dangerous. Autodoc on opposite side of this wing, McWard goes with Kit and Dozer to fix his broken foot.

Ruby asks help to get a sample from a living subject, she says it used to be her husband, patient A. Alex Scott, had been taking pills for months. He’s got a full on black exoskeleton. Only one human eye uncovered, elongated head, tracks us with his one good eye. Ruby says she never took any of those pills. She talks to her husband a bit, says she needs live tissues. Ruby asks Dozer for help. Ruby carefully goes into the hodling cell, Alex says “The Queen is coming, she will not abide what you’re doing here.”

Alex’s arms are thin and elongated, legs are shorter than other xenos. He scampers up the wall watching everyone, claws digging in the walls. He leaps at Dozer, clawing at him but the tough roughneck shrugs off the attack. Dozer sets him on fire with a flame thrower. After a short fight, Alex dies in a corner completely burned. Ruby is in tears, runs away from the cell.

Maddox goes to find Ruby. One door is locked and won’t open. Maddox knocks but gets no answer. He hacks into the door, it slides open. Ruby is in a corner in a desk chair, crying. She says she’s gonna be there in a minute. Weylon checks Alex out for a sample, cuts him open, and finds some suitable blood and tissues deeper in.

Ruby comes back. McWard is done with the autodoc. Asks wtf was all that noise and yelling earlier. Dozer explains, everyone grabs some supplies. We go to the lift, go to Floor4. Ruby says there’ sa more direct route to elevator. We climb to a catwalk, roger goes first, Weylon picks up signals on his tracker, at least 7.

Trinket feels some confusion and happiness, Roger opens a door slowly, hall goes to a 4way intersection. Ruby says we need to go right, we all move slowly. Dots are moving toward us on the tracker, there’s a sudden shriek of pain ahead, hall to the right is choked with a chaos of resin mess.Something is coming from around the corner. We move back a bit to assume defense positions.

There’s a large chamber ahead of us, Dozer blasts his flamer down the right hallway, resins melt a bit and it smells like shit. Ruby says the large room is Receiving for this floor. We’ll move to the corner and into the room. A creepy mutated guy comes up in view and asks us to come with him to go to the Queen, he turns around and runs away. Ruby says we don’t need to go that way to go to the elevator, she says it looked like Walter. We are getting signals from the resin coated hall, a door at the end is caked in hard resin. We debate which way to go. We go into the storage room. Weylon says he gets a lot of signals but can’t figure out where they’re from.

Dozer looks up and sees someone falling from the ceiling onto Weylon. Dozer grabs the thing as it crashes into Weylon, the creature has its claws buried into Weylon’s chest and is trying to dig deeper. The creature gets yanked off Weylon but disembowels him in the process. Weylon is dead! 3 more creatures fall down, combat ensues. Roger and Kit get dragged some distance away, Roger sees a woman shrieking tied to a wall her lower body is a huge grub and she’s plopping eggs out. Some of the eggs are about to open. Roger fires a grenade into that room. Something comes out of one of the eggs, it’s a person with a long tongue and a claw at the end. Roger is held down by 2 more creatures.

Kit runs in that room and blows up the tongue creature, Roger gets splashed a bit by acid but no biggie. Ruby says the Queen is Amy. Everything gets eventually blown up in that room. Maddox gets charged at by a creature and hit pretty hard, his right arm is ripped clean, and it sprays milky white fluid. Maddox is a synth! Bastard!

People bandage their wounds, Maddox says he’s got no idea what’s going on. Ruby says Amy was a bridesmaid at her wedding. There’s a door behind where the Queen was. We salvage all the useful gear from Weylon’s corpse. There’s a big lab behind the queen, huge holes melted in the floor of the room, seems like there were some fights between mutants and pure xenos, there’s a door at the other end.

Roger opens the door, it’s going down, stairs to a landing 10ft wide in an arc. Down and left is a lift. We move carefully 60m until we get to an intersection. The vent over the T intersection is opened. 40m down the left is the lift. Vents are closed. We get to the lift, it opens immediately, the ceiling hatch is open, crashed down on the floor. We argue which way to access the mines. Lv1 has a large access bay, Lv3 has observation deck, narrow and single file. The lift jerks into motion, begins to go up. We’re heading to Lv3. Doors open up, hallway with 3 doors, Door L at the end.

We go to Observation deck, small room with no functioning equipment. Trinket says she canT’ feel anything around us. Motion tracker picks up a ping in the room just ahead, room M. Roger goes in first, spots feet at the corner of a wall. A voice says “I’m not armed.” Someone steps out, wearing a W-Y jumpsuit, a bit of blood over the suit. Says he came with a squad of W-Y commandos, got in a fight with the local security, everyone got beset by aliens, they’re all dead now, says he’s Dillan Ginnis. Roger searches Dillan, we listen to a recorder he carries, some convos about drug deals.

Dillan says he was fired by W-Y for having done shady deals, commandos came here to capture a synth that went rogue. We chat with Ginnis, argue what do to next, Maddox says he wants to carry the nukes by himself down the mines. We decide to all go together. We open the door with a loud squeal, there is a rocky path going down. Everything is dusty. 10-15m before the first landing, small console station. Lights up very weakly. Passage leads far to the west.

Ginnis messes with the console, we’re 30miles away from the mine itself. Turns on the lights, lots of mining equipment including transport vehicles. Fuel cells are weak but still work. This layers of dust and dirt everywhere. We begin driving west. We reach the mine, iron pilings that give access to the mine area. Trinket feels an intense sense of dread. She’s shrunk down on the floorboard of the vehicle.

We’re in a staging area, helmets and jackets everywhere. 2 exits and a big sign “stairwell exit” to the left. Roger shines his light into the stairwell exit. Motion tracker is quiet. Claw marks on the ceiling. Looks like a high traffic area. We search through some vehicles for anything useful, sadly no maps, some overalls. We head out right from the staging area, 30m then 20m and angle and opens up into a chamber. Ceiling are quite high. Room is pretty big. Resin on walls, someone stuck on wall with chest burst open, egg at its feet. Ruby says this is Lawrence, who probably died in the last week.

More resin past the room, rib-like structures on the walls. Hallway is very tight. Resin has formed a circular portal we’d need to crawl through. Trinket feels bad things are about to happen ahead of us. We see people cocooned on the walls with eggs in front of them. There are unopened eggs, Roger offers to grenade the room. Maddox offers to go in first since he’s not likely to be attacked. No fewer than 12 ppl on the wall. Mining equipment sticking out of resin. 3 unopened eggs. Maddox searches through the room.

Maddox peeks up some stairs, weird T-shape landing, hallways going in a few different directions. Trinket says something is near. She’s opening up a squeaky metal lunchbox. She pulls a cigar out and starts chewing on it. Ava and Maddox will take flamers to torch the eggs while we watch over them. They torch 3 eggs. When the eggs go up in flames, the motion tracker starts beeping a lot.

Trinket explains that she couldn’t control her movements, when she was called to by the xenos. Also couldn’t speak.

We decide to clear the side rooms first along the hallway, to not leave anything behind us. We do Door M first. Near it is a big imprint of a bloody hand smeared upward on the wall, leading to a busted up vent, the blood is half dried up, probably only a few hours old. McWard takes aim at the vent while Trinket opens the door.

It’s a small room with computers. It’s messy, terminals are knocked on the floor, there is a large hole in the floor, no bodies visible. The hole seems to have been burnt into the floor. We close the door, go to room N.

It’s a large communal kitchen, mostly undisturbed. Door on the opposite end of room reads “i”. In that room is a cafeteria for about 12 people. Chairs and tables are overturned. Large monitors on walls only show static. Two large doors lead to L and H. Smaller doors have plaques near them, William Bateson and Thomas Hunt.

We go in H. A hallway smeared with blood. Air vent busted out, with a pool of blood underneath. More smaller doors with plaques near them, Nikolai Vavilov, Theodosius DeVries (this one has the most blood).

We go in Theo’s room first. The door is ajar but we can’t see anything inside as it opens into a narrow hallway. Motion tracker indicates a blip inside, 2-3m away. Dozer opens the door fully, and inside on the floor is a shriveled faced hugger.

Roger calls out for whoever is there to come out or we’ll flame the room. A hand comes from around a corner, shaking. It seems to be a female hand and Roger asks if she’s Ruby Scott. Roger slowly walks into the room, there is a woman huddled in fetal position under a desk, wearing a bloody lab coat. She keeps mumbling over and over “i” or “aye”, hugging her legs. She wears no name tag or lanyard with ID. Roger goes to give her some Naproleve, as she looks up at him, we see one of her eyes is gone, with a black smooth shell covering it instead. SHE LEAPS AT ROGER, CLAWS DIGGING INTO HIS THROAT!

After a brief firefight, with Roger and Dozer and Finn and Weylon shooting the room up, the woman dies and is laid down on a bed, with some of her blood slowly eating through a few spots on the walls.

Outside in the hallway, McWard is still with Ava and Trinket. Trinket says that there is a gun pointed on her. Ava shoves Trinket into the room, McWard follows in.

A male voice comes from the cafeteria, asking us to explain “what’s going on here.”

Ava asks the man to come out and throw their gun down. After a bit of back and forth, a man comes into view, but still holding their down, pointed down.

Inside the room, McWard checks the lady for a pulse, she seems to have none.

The man’s name is Steve, he went to cryosleep on a Weyland-Yutani ship and woke up on this station instead. Says he’s a marine, and has been awake less than 24h.

On the bed, the lady we assumed was dead starts whispering something. Finn just shoots a burst at her but bullets just ricochet off of her. She shrieks MOTHER!, her back arches and she begins convulsing. Roger puts an end to that with an accurate burst, blood splatters everywhere, and Trinket starts screaming, clutching at her chest. She then tells us that when the lady was shot, she ‘felt’ it too.

Steve tells us he was hiding in Thomas Hunt’s room, where there were 2 beds, a bathroom and shower, and no blood. Says he’s not seen a room 3-E.

It appears the lady was Barbara McLintok, science staff. One of the other doors has her name on it, and the last one is Erich Von Tshernak.

In Barbara’s room, clothes everywhere, computer on the floor, more pills like the ones we found on the first guy we came across in the control room.

Weylon breaks into her computer, the monitor is busted a bit but doesn’t prevent him from succeeding. There are many logs of recent events. A video log indicates “long term testing most disheartening, we thought it would be safe.”

In Erich’s room, we see a corpse laying on the bed, chest bursted out. Vent has been ripped open.

McWard explains facehuggers to Steve, showing him the shriveled one we found in Theo’s room.

Trinket says a lot of monsters are coming, she feels a big sense of dread.

We run to open the door to L. There are a whole bunch of distorted signals on the motion tracker, about 60m away.

Door opens to a hallway with a K door. Another door leads back to places we’ve already been to.

In K room, it’s an octagonal rec room, 2 gigantic displays, game terminals everywhere, vents are all intact. Motion sensor indicates the signals are 30m away. We discuss where to go next. Signals are 20m away.

We notice a door that is opened where it should be closed. Landow goes to have a closer look. On a higher platform, Trinket is kneeling next to a body. She says the body is torn in two and it was like that when she got there (odd comment?). She found a key card on the body, the lanyard says this was Theodosius DeVries. Motion 10m away to the north.

Ava is twitching a little bit, she says she fears the protocols are having an adverse effect on her.

There is clacking and scraping against the north wall. We run to the lift, going down to Level5. Trinket says there is something on top of the lift. We hear a slow scraping against the ceiling. Lift is VERY SLOW going down. There is still noise on top. We see the access hatch wiggling a little bit. Roger decides that’s enough and shoots a burst through the ceiling. A shriek is heard and the elevator shakes a little. We pass the Level4. A large black claw pokes through one of the bullet holes. We notice no acid dripping down.

10min after passing Lv4, we reach Level5. The floor is made of metallic grating, leaving pipes and wiring visible. Seems to be the engineering level for the whole station. Doors open up into a massive room with generators and pipes everywhere. There is scaffolding going up, and it’s dark and loud and poorly lit.

We nope out and head back up to Level4, ride takes a long 15mins. Much slower going up than down. There is a wide passage that leads to a T intersection. Area looks very sterile. Landow and New Guy Steve check corners carefully. It’s a curving passage on both sides. Signs on the wall point left for Labs and right for Supplies. 100ft down a hall leads to an automatic sliding door, halfway opened and trying to close on a body. There’s a gigantic bite hole in the head. ID says Tanaka Hoshi. There are stairs leading up. Motion tracker catches a ping coming from where the elevator is.

We go up the stairs, more doors everywhere. The one closest to us has a sign that says Observation, lots of racket coming from behind it. Motion tracker picks up maybe 8 pings, lots of shrieking and screaming.

We notice cameras in the hallways swinging to follow our movements. Weylon fails at breaking into the camera feed. We open the door with a keycard we found earlier. Inside are many observation cells with mutated people freaking out inside of them. So mutated we can barely tell they’re human, they’re far too gone to save.

South door opens into an office. Weylon cannot access the computer systems. Ava says her systems are being overtaxed and stops speaking mid sentence.

There’s a really loud clatter behind us coming from where the lift is. Trinket says there is a monster there. There’s sounds of metal tearing. Tracker picks movement coming toward us.

Steve notices movement up in the air ducts, a moment before one of the covers falls and a xeno drops down right in front of him.

Ensues a ferocious fight where two smaller xenos are killed, a third one escapes while severely wounded, and a last, large one runs up to Finn and Trinket and literally rips its own chest open, spraying them with acidic blood, but thankfully only inflicting minor wounds.

After bandaging everyone’s wounds, we find a room with stasis pods, which Steve recognizes as what he was in. There’s another person in a pod, dead. More cryo tubes with half human half xeno monstrosities, all dead.

Door to the back of that room leads to another area with many computers and lab equipment, and many other doors.

North door leads to stairs going down. Another hallway with doors and names on them. Christian Cotch, Kevin Warwick, Ruby Scott. One door has no name on it.

Ruby’s door is locked. Roger kicks it in. It’s a clean room. Trinket finds a picture of a red-haired lady that looks like the one we initially saw in the lab video feed. On the picture, she’s standing next to Captain Brackett. McWard notices there is a family resemblance between Ruby and Brackett.

There’s motion behind Christina’s door. Trinket gets a dim, confused feeling. Weylon opens the door and a FACEHUGGER LEAPS AT HIM! He barely fends the beast off, keeping it off his face but the tail gets wrapped around his neck. Ava, Dozer and Steve combine efforts to pry the thing away from Weylon and toss it in the air, and Weylon blasts it cleanly with his .357 revolver.

There’s an unmarked door to the south with stairs going down. Floppy doors lead into an enormous room. We’re on a platform that overlooks the room. Huge enclosure with hive resin everywhere, and there’s a side door that is opened. There might be an egg layer here. There are two doors down there a large and a small one.

We argue what to do next, try to find Ruby or find a spot to leave the nuke.

We go down the stairs, there’s a lift under the platform. Keycard activates the lift. There’s a synth with both arms missing, he’s inactive. Only one button heading up inside the lift. 15mins going up. We’re in a lab with a bunch of equipment, computer terminals. We see a door labeled E.

Two more doors are labeled D and F. Door to E is barred. We bang on the door, Trinket senses surprise. After a big of chatter, the door is opened from the inside, and we meet Ruby Scott. We go in and bar the door behind us. There’s some racket back there, some bodies in tubes, half xenos half human.

We do a lot of talking with Ruby. Lasalle developed a supplement that was supposed to enhance you, it’s pretty addictive. Thomas Hunt is in one of the tubes. Lasalle was harvesting Royal Jelly from the Queen, but it’s too strong for humans, they have tried synthetizing their own, results were unfavorable. Weyland-Yutani planned the disaster at Hadley’s Hope, willing to sacrifice everything and everyone to gather more samples. They supposedly knew about the derelict ship on LV-426 but didn’t do anything about it.

The Cerberus is actually the Sulaco renamed. They raided W-Y stores for equipment and supplies. W-Y and LaSalle are aware of what Brackett is doing but they can’t say anything publicly about it. The hive and Queen are in the mine, the Queen is loose. There’s a large hangar door on the first floor that leads to the mines.

==- END OF TRANSMISSION ==-

THE DESCENT

The Cerberus had mostly destroyed the LaSalle spaceport on New Galveston, leaving only a few access points to the underground base. 2 ships had managed to leave. Brackett says they will pursue the Church ship who gathered xeno samples on Sullivan9 before they reach Earth.

Maddox believes it’s Weyland-Yutani who implanted him with a tracking chip during a a procedure he got a while ago.

Brackett calls us all together again, The Church ship has a 30 days lead on the Cerberus so they need to leave very soon. Tells us they have an informant on the station, appearance unknown, only known as Ruby Scott. Asks us to exfill her. Last transmission as of two days ago, there was panic on the station. Ruby knows Brackett and Parris. Cerberus will return as soon as they have dealt with the Church ship.

We are given a small nuclear device, the detonator given to Kit Handred. Landow is ecstatic at the thought of having to detonate it. Landow goes to take another long dump and do God knows what. Brackett tells us to set a long timer on the bomb before we detonate it, we should be able to get back on the surface where it might be relatively safe, the station is about 1 mile underground. Brackett suggests we put the nuke in the xeno hive if we can find it. The nuke weighs about 100lbs.

We discuss our options to approach the base undetected, Brackett says we’re unlikely to sneak in undisturbed. We’ll probably need Ruby’s help to get the nuke in the right spot. We determine that weapons don’t do much against xenos unless we have armor piercing rounds.

Brackett sends us back onto the Sherwood. Gordi flies us to the designated area on the planet. It’s dry and rocky and devoid of life.

McWard finally gets to draw some blood from Maddox, his blood his red, everyone seems to not be a synth so far, except Ava.

Landow says in 20h we’ll get a supply drop of ammo, which is later revised to 6h. It comes to light that he might be indirectly responsible for Kit Handred’s ship being blown up with his constant transmission of messages.

We make plans to go down into the station as the ship is made ready for planetfall, it’ll take about 2h to get there.

Weylon’s decoder goes off, it intercepts an outgoing message but can’t figure out what the code is yet.

Kit and Landow argue about what he’s done, telling Weyland-Yutani our position.

Finn and Gordi prep the ship for landing. We argue is we wait for the Weyland-Yutani ship to arrive with the supplies or not. Landow wants to wait, everyone else kinda wants to go now.

We’re planning to land about 1 mile off site and drive our APC over there.

We’re about 20mins away from landing when we pick up a signal of incoming ship. Seems to just be a transport C-Class, Finn says there is no weapon lock on us. Ship hails us, asks for Roger Landow. Ship says we gotta make this fast.

Gordi laments that he’s just a hauler, he shouldn’t be in this situation. Landow says he wouldn’t be in this situation if he hadn’t been carrying xenos in the first place.

Finn suddenly realizes there is a weapon lock on us. The ship rocks as it gets hit but it doesn’t seem to be coming from the C-Class ship. A sweep doesn’t indicate or detect any other presence around us. There is a fire in the crew quarters, then a second explosion happens and we’re suddenly venting air out. A second sweep reveals a frigate that was running cloaked, it’s a Weyland-Yutani ship.

Gordi tells us to make for the escape pods while he takes the Sherwood down asap.

Trinket is missing again and Gordi is piloting, the ship is shaking as we’re heading down toward the planet.

There’s another huge explosion from the crew quarters.

McWard runs to the medbay to grab as many supplies as he can.

Maddox tries to keep the bulkhead hatches from coming down, to keep a clear exit path to the escape pods.

Another explosion, ship feels like it’s spinning.

Maddox runs to the medbay to get McWard, sees him filling his bags with drugs and medkits. Another massive explosion next to them, McWard gets knocked out and gets a broken foot in the process. Maddox drags him to the escape pods.

Escape pod launches, the Sherwood is spinning, will probably “land” somewhere on the planet.

Finn pilots the pod down to the planet, it’s a Mars-like barren landscape, dust and rocks everywhere. The ruins of the station are east of us. Strange rock formations to the west. Smoke further west.

McWard binds his broken foot and finds something to use as a crutch.

Kit blames Landow for getting us shot out of the sky, W-Y would never have known where we were if not for him – allegedly.

We debate whether going back to when the ship landed a few hours away, or to the ruins which are much closer. We decide going to the station. Gordi says there are some holes in the hull, and not Landow’s fault this time around.

We gather around the nearest entrance hatch, Weylon hacks into the controls and manages to open it. Down the tunnel shaft is a tangle of steel and wires, like something has collapsed. We go to the next nearest entrance, and we notice it shuts close as we get nearer. Roger pounds on the hatch.

From behind a low wall, a xeno suddenly pounces on Roger, then another one shows up.

A firefight ensues where Roger is nearly dragged away, Kit and Roger suffer some acid blood burns, both xenos are killed.

The shaft the xenos came out is entirely covered in hardened resin.

The third hatch is locked, Weylon unlocks it. The shaft is clean of xeno presence. There’s a ladder going down 30ft to a grate/catwalk.

Landow goes down first, gun aimed down, it smells a lot of body odor down there. Kit, Weylon, Maddox, Trinket, McWard somehow and Dozer go down the ladder.

There’s a guy hiding under a console in that room. Maddox yells at him to come out but he’s ignored.

The guy asks us if we’re from the company. He’s drooling, holding pills, face is distorted, angular, like plastic burned on him. He looks at Trinket, says “It’s you, really you, SHE said you would come.

Trinket suddenly yells that “This isn’t a real person!” and Maddox immediately shoots his gun at him. Everyone else shoots, the man is riddled with bullets, he falls on the ground, weakly looks up at Trinket and says “Mama..” Blood is seeping from the wounds, it burns and hisses but not as potent as actual xeno blood.

The pills he was holding are capsules, no markings other than a LaSalle logo. McWard takes a few pills for him and Weylon to analyze later.

The guy built a nest under the terminal. There is a lanyard with the name and picture of a Raynier Weiss on it. Guy has spiky ridges down his pants legs. Large claws on one hand. Service pistol in his pants. His drooling is starting to harden like the xeno resin we saw earlier.

This room appears to be some kind of emergency station. Maddox accesses some basic controls, turns on all the lights in the station. There are no maps of schematics available here. There are hundred of camera feeds but 95 of them are dark. We see a cafeteria, back wall is covered with resin and weird twisty formations.%

We see some kind of lab, there is a woman sitting at a microscope. Door to the lab is sealed, piles of stuff against it. There is a body with a sheet over it on a table. Camera seems centered in the room, more of that room behind the camera that we can’t see.

Above the lab door is the indication 3-E. The woman has a comms unit on her head. She suddenly gets up and walks off camera very fast. She then comes back into view right in front of the camera, flips the bird and the camera goes black. Woman has long red hair.

Another feed shows about 10 security guards cleaning rifles, room 1-B.

We hear gunfire seeming coming from the surface. Landow locks the surface exit. We think it might be Weyland-Yutani troops following us. We open a hatch in the floor, it smells like gunpowder, a ladder goes down 50m to a hallway, 10m away is a lift.

Weylon calls the elevator to us. We go down about 20minutes, the door opens into a large hangar. Plenty of stuff covered with tarps. We check the other lift going to deeper floors, Weylon calls it up to us. In the hangar it seems everything of use that wasn’t bolted down has been removed.

A door leading to 1-B begins to open, it’s the room where we saw the guards earlier. Maddox who had been moving closer to that door dives by the ramp leading up to the door, trying to remain unseen. Everyone else takes cover behind large stuff. Guard conversation indicates they are worried about the elevator coming up. They call out for us to “Come out!” They seem to think it’s some “jelly head maybe”.

They go back in their room after leaving a device on the floor by the door.

Trinket suddenly wanders off as if in a daze. Kit runs after her, grabs her, Trinket begins to scream thinking it’s a monster who grabbed her. The device left by the door starts beeping rapidly.

The lift comes up to our floor, there is a corpse in it with distorted facial features, elongated head only on one side.

The device at the door suddenly explodes, scattering ball bearings everywhere in the hangar but we’re all safe aboard the lift.

We decide to head down to Lv3.

Trinket calms down once she realizes she’s safe with us. She says creatures were calling to her.

It’s another 20mins to Lv3.

There are 3 doors ahead of us in the hallway, labelled L, M and N.

==- END OF TRANSMISSION ==-

McWard discusses with Trinket about her sense of dread, her ability to detect nearby xenomorphs. She says it’s pretty vague and only gives her the feeling of small dread or big dread and a general direction, nothing more specific. Crew wonders if we could use her to find the remaining two facehuggers lurking around the Sherwood.

The crew discusses with Ava about her protocols.

We decide to fly 30 days to New Galveston looking for the Cerberus. Nobody will be in cryosleep except for Hooper and the injured crew found on the Archer.

McWard and Weylon research ways to neutralize xeno acid blood, perhaps a basic solution in a propulsion device like a fire extinguisher might dampen the acid’s potency a little bit.

Dozer and the new girl Kit work on doing some repairs on the Sherwood.

Maddox tries to rewrite some of Ava’s code to bring her back to a more normal mode.

2 weeks into our flight to New Galveston, we pick up a distress call a day off course, if we ignore it we risk losing our shipping license. Finn sends a message but receives no response. As far as we know, we are most likely alone out there on the frontier.

As we get there, it seems the ship could have been a heavily modified G-class transport (smaller than Sherwood). It’s slowly rolling over end to end. Very old ship, retrofiffted. No signs, symbols, marks, emblems on it. No radiation or power. No other ships on long range scan. The ship shows a lot of scoring around the engines like it’s been shot at.

Landow, Kit, Dozer and Weylon suit up to go on the unknown ship.

We attach an umbilical to the underside of the ship leading into the cargo hold. Weylon fails to open the ship’s door so Maddox suits up and goes over, he succeeds and everyone gets into the ship’s cargo hold. Maddox and Weylon then fail to break into the ship’s controls to learn more about it.

In the cargo are sealed metallic crates with bar codes on them.

Crew goes up a ladder and progresses further into the unknown ship.

Back on the Sherwood, Gordi and Finn are on the bridge. Suddenly 5 pirates show up out of nowhere with guns (seems they were hiding in the crates the crew walked by in the other ship’s cargo hold) and disarm Finn and Gordi.

In the Medbay, McWard hears a clamor in the vents, it’s Trinket, she says there are bad people on the ship. He grabs some weapons and makes his way to the bridge.

On the bridge, the pirates tell Finn and Gordi that all they want are the little girl and the synth Ava.

On his way there, McWard comes across Ava and tells her there are bad people threatening Trinket. Ava smash.

From the other ship, the rest of the crew races back to the Sherwood. The pirates start a countdown and threaten to start killing people if Ava and Trinket aren’t handed to them.

Crew makes a plan to give a stun grenade to Ava and have her walk in as if she’s turning herself in and then hopefully stun most of the pirates with the grenade as the rest of the crew slips in behind her.

Ava walks in, throws the grenade but somehow all the pirates manage to resist getting stunned. A wild firefight ensues in which Landow decides shooting armor piercing bullets through a pirate and the ship’s hull is a smart plan. One of the pirates shoots Captain Gordi at close range trying to execute him. Landow gets shot back. Maddox takes a glancing hit. Ava punches a pirate into oblivion. Even Trinket gets in the action and shoots a pirate who falls unconscious.

Dozer and McWard stabilize the captain, who someone only suffered a minor wound. There are four dead pirates and a surviving one that had been subdued. We feel our ship shudder so we immediately disconnect the umbilical. There are likely some more pirates on the other ship. After taking pics of the faces, we space the dead pirates’ corpses.

The captured pirate’s name is Alice. She has a manly voice. She says there are separate contract on our ship/crew from two different buyers. The other ship is named the Verner, there are 2 crew left on it. Alice says they’re just bounty hunters, nothing personal.

Finn receives a coded transmission from the marshal services.

We put Alice in cryosleep.

We wonder how the pirates knew where to find us, since they were waiting for us on our way to a location we hadn’t discussed with anyone outside the Sherwood.

Finn discovers there were transmissions sent from the Sherwood, outside of Mother’s systems. It seems to be a pretty advanced system sending encrypted messages.

We learn that there is a bounty on the ship itself, and the whole crew with all of our names listed. Other bounty seems to be for Ava and Trinket alone, per Alice.

Weylon digs through Ava’s code again but fails to achieve anything.

Because of the constant threat of facehuggers, we split duties and sleep on rotating schedules so there’s always several people up at any time.

Trinket finds a hole in some air ducts, but it’s too small for her to crawl in, so she shows it to the rest of the crew. The steel looks like it’s been melted – likely a facehugger hiding spot.

Dozer and Weylon put together a crude motion tracker. We try to track the two remaining facehugger for the next two weeks without success.

We finally arrive at New Galveston, there is a whole lot of debris in orbit around the planet, including the wreck of the Marion, the ship that used to support the planet before blowing up. Initially we find no sign of the Cerberus, until we pick up their signal coming our way. They hail us asking to shut down our engines. Cerberus captain Brackett says he asked us to not return to this space, but Gordi replies that we have a bit of a situation going on.

Before the Cerberus links with the Sherwood, Ava and Trinket go to hide in the secret compartment in the cargo hold. Maddox goes with them.

We’re quickly taken onto the Cerberus by Brackett. He asks our two colonial marines Kit Handred and Roger Landow what they are doing on the Sherwood and how they ended up there. Kit tells her story about how her ship got blown up and she was the only survivor until we picked her up, Landow says he’s assigned to Sherwood for protection. Brackett asks Landow where Maddox is, Landow says he got spaced during an attack, but the lie doesn’t seem to convince Brackett.

Then a lot of back-and-forth talking happens with both sides seemingly dancing around some issues. Brackett eventually says one of us is a male synth.

Kit brings Lt Parris back on the Sherwood with a squad of marines, she shows them the hiding spot where Ava, Trinket and Maddox are. Parris tries to get everyone to go on the Cerberus but Maddox argues that he needs to stay in the hiding spot because it’s shielded from transmission. He eventually gets the upper hand and Parris leaves.

Brackett asks Gordi why we came back to New Galveston. Gordi admits that we have xenos on the ship. We tell Brackett that LaSalle and Weyland-Yutani might be in some bioweapon arms race against each other to breed the aliens. LaSalle has a facility in Brazil on Earth where they’re trying to move all their assets. LaSalle has also proven poor at keeping creatures secured.

Brackett implies one of us works for LaSalle and one of us works for Weyland-Yutani.

Brackett, Parris and about 20 marines travel back onto the Sherwood, we talk some more, Maddox says he believes there’s a tracker implanted inside of him, which is why he wanted to remain in the secret compartment. Later a man shows up from the Cerberus who is clearly a synth, he’s called Davis. He checks Ava to make sure she’s not transmitting anything.

Brackett says more and more synths learned to burn their uplink to their manufacturers and recode their protocols. Brackett takes all those in cryosleep back onto the Cerberus.

Suddenly Maddox collapses. Marines transport him to the Cerberus. McWard swings by the medbay to grab some medical supplies before rejoining the rest of the crew on the Cerberus.

Brackett talks about Empaths, how they have some manner of connection with Xenos and how they have dreadful nightmares when sleeping. Everyone stares at Trinket.

There is a group called the Church of Immaculate Incubation that believes the Empaths are destined to birth xeno queens and they can sense the approach of nearby xenos. The Church leader is named Salvaje.

Xenos will take characteristics of their host. For instance if they infect a dog, they will walk and run on all fours instead of walking upright like humans.

McWard draws blood from everyone. Gordie, the dog Dixie, Mcward himself, Kit, Landow, Finn, Weylon, Dozer, Trinket, everyone checks fine with red blood. Still need to do Maddox once he’s back from wherever they took him.

Brackett wants us to go down on the planet’s surface and clean the place up, while they themselves clean our ship of the remaining two facehuggers. Then they’ll chase the Church ship before it reaches Earth and unleashes xenos there or something.

Brackett says there is a xeno queen below ground, he’ll give us instructions on how to find it and kill it.

Kit gets a field promotion to Sgt so she can keep Landow in check. No more shooting holes through the hull please.

Maddox was right and did have a chip in him, the docs on the Cerberus remove it.

Brackett admits the Cerberus operates outside of Colonial Marine authority. He gives Weylon a piece of equipment to detect and decrypt outgoing transmissions. Hooper and Alice the Bounty Hunter are given back into our custody.

=== END OF TRANSMISSION ===

Trinket had been hiding in the ceiling in the lab on the station, she drops down and begins punching on Ava, asking her to let Red and Maddox out of the cell, but Ames tells Ava to “secure this one” and Trinket becomes increasingly nervous.

Maddox gives some Naproleve to Red who’s having some pleasant dreams right now. He tries to bluff Ames and Ava that he gave her enough to OD, in hope they would come in to try and save her, but his bluff finds no purchase on the two.

Ames starts chasing Trinket since Ava won’t, but the young girl easily evades him.

Maddox tries to increase his bluff but he’s not successful.

The rest of the crew is getting closer, racing down the halls as fast as they can and starting to hear the commotion in the lab.

Trinket keeps running away from Ames, ducking and bobbing and weaving away while trying to figure out a way to open the room where Maddox and Red are trapped in.

Finn gets to the lab first followed by the others, he rushes Ames and pins him to the wall with a good shove.

The cell door holding Red and Maddox slides open, Maddox immediately tries to shoot at Ava but misses.

Ames yells to Ava “INITIATE PROTOCOL 34B” and she begins grappling with Maddox, easily pinning his gun hand to a wall.

McWard rushes to Red trying to peel off the facehugger away from her, by cutting one of the long digits of the creature that wraps around Red’s head. Acid spews from the cut narrowly missing both and it burns a deep hole into the floor.

Ava disarms Maddox and knocks him down prone. Trinket runs to her and orders her to go help Red. Ava says “You’ve always been a good friend.”, then releases Maddox and makes her way toward Red.

Weylon runs up behind Ava, tries to shoot her with his revolver but the bullet ricochets off the back of her head, doing minimal damage.

Ames rambles about “the words of the Prophet” saying we don’t understand what’s going on. Finn just keeps him securely pinned to the wall.

McWard tries to pull the creature’s tail away from Red’s neck but it’s too tightly wound around it.

Dozer also runs up to Ames and pushes his head against the wall, Ames tries to fight back but he’s held too tightly by two men.

Ava kneels by Red, grabs the creature’s tail and easily pulls it away from Red’s neck. Maddox joins in the effort and pulls the face hugger away from Red’s face, a long tube slips out from within her throat and she immediately begins to convulse.

Weylon goes to Ames and tells him that if he keeps fighting back, he’ll just shoot him.

McWard tries to assist Red as she convulses. The tremors suddenly stop. He checks her vitals, she’s dead. He tries to perform CPR on her.

Ava suggests they should shoot the facehugger pretty quickly.

Ava and Maddox prepare to throw the facehugger away and shoot it. Weylon and Maddox both blast the creature with gunshots and leave it dead on the floor.

McWard does everything he can think of to help Red, but it appears she is truly dead.

Dozer puts Ames into an armbar. Maddox fills in McWard with all that happened, since earlier he had given his comms unit to Ava so he missed most of what unfolded in the cells here. Upon learning of her death, Finn grabs Red’s rifle and walks up to Ames, summarily executing him.

Ames has a key card on him.

McWard enquires to the rest of the crew why Ava is allowed to wander around freely after she being responsible for the death of a crew member and nearly a second one. Ava says she was only following orders.

Weylon examines a computer terminal, tries to rip the hard drive out but he find himself unable because of the tense situation messing with his nerves.

Trinket says there might be other monsters lurking around.

We make our way back up along the lift ladder. Weylon takes a moment to scan for movement, he gets a ping that is really right next to us. The ping then vanishes. As he was going higher up along the ladder, an air vent covers gets blasted open right next to Weylon and tries to grab him. In the process, Weylon drops his motion sensor down the elevator shaft and ultimately gets yanked into the air ducts, starting to scream. Dozer shines his light into the air ducts but only catches a glimpse of Weylon’s boots disappearing around a corner as he’s being dragged away. The shrieking suddenly gets cut off.

We all run back to the Sherwood, close the airlocks and detach from the station. We need to find air scrubbers, our air supply is critically low. We fly off to the wreckage of the military frigate nearby.

McWard and Dozer go to the frigate looking for scrubbers and anything else useful. We try to open a door but it feels like someone is fighting to keep it closed on the other side.

They finally get in, there’s a woman in a spacesuit and carrying a few weapons.

Through gestures since they don’t share comms, McWard and Dozer figure out that she’s the only survivor on the frigate.

They move through a succession of airlocks toward engineering but they determine that is likely where the blast that destroyed the frigate originated so pretty much everything is a huge mess.

The three of them eventually make their way back to the Sherwood. The woman introduces herself as Kit Handred, a colonial marine.

Everyone takes turns filling her in about all that has happened. McWard shows her a dead face hugger so she knows what they look like and to be extremely careful around them.

Ava talks with Trinket about Dr Ames and says he might have become unhinged at some point and released the xenos during the battle.

We suddenly hear the voice of Weylon over comms. Apparently he’s still alive! Says he’s hot and can’t move. Doesn’t know where he is.

Kit says she was part of the crew of the Mikawa. (WYSS?)

We make plans to head back to the station since Weylon is still alive.

Ava tells us about what happened overall on the station. How the Xenos started to kill the staff but soon moved to abducting people instead, to infect and impregnate them. She talks of Stage 2 xenos.

Stage1 are the eggs, Stage2 are the face huggers, she speaks of Stage3 which is a small serpent-like thing that comes out of someone’s chest, and grows rapidly into Stage4 within a matter of 8 hours or so, standing 6-7 feet tall with some even growing up to 8-9 feet tall.

A queen would lay eggs, and there’s a process where a xeno would take materials off of corpses to create more eggs. They’re intelligent. They would remove bodies and weapons after fights.

Ava thinks there might be between 2 and 5 xenos on the station. Possibly more.

We go to the station, the power is back on. We head to the lowest level, all of us. It’s very hot and moist down there. We look around for the motion tracker that Weylon dropped, but it’s smashed to pieces.

Radiation levels are currently weak. Finn shines his flashlight around, a creature lunges from the shadows trying to grab him. A bit of shooting happens before the creature slinks back into the shadows. Trinket becomes agitated, climbing back the ladder up. There was a loud crash on the floor above us.

Weylon is still alive, says he’s stuck in some dark place where everything is caked in goo. He sees an egg right in front of him. Tells us he’s wrapped/tied to a wall.

There are strange biomechanical formations on walls, rib-like, seeming made of resin, a muted grey-green. It’s almost entirely engulfing the ladder.

There’s a large airlock jammed open by secreted resin. Trinket has a feeling some monsters are nearby. Maddox tries to talk her into sticking around and keeping Ava in check since it seems she’s the only one the synth will listen to.

We step out of the airlock into a large room, there’s about a foot of water. Smoke makes a staticy sound. Room is mostly square, with all pieces of furniture cocooned. We see 2 bodies stuck to walls, with their chests burst open from the inside.

Ava says the xenos do not give off thermal readings. In the hallway, there is an asian person stuck to the wall with their chest burst open.

We suddenly gets a comms message from the captain says there’s a ship with a large signature coming in, we have about 50 minutes before we need to fly away.

We recall that the Prophet was a smaller ship probably launched from a larger one, that might be that one.

We see an unopened egg in a corner. Some plan to shoot the egg, while Trinket says some monsters are coming closer to us. They shoot the egg, it splatters all over the place.

Maddox peeks in a large circular room, there are plenty of empty eggs, plenty of unopened eggs. We can see at least one body on the back wall.

Weylon remains very very still where he’s trapped for fear of alerting any nearby creatures.

We walk to a next corner, something smashes right through a wall and slams into Dozer, trying to grab him, but the strong Russian fends the creature off.

A brief but intense firefight erupts. Weylon says he can hear the shooting. Dozer is somehow mesmerized by the creature. The xeno is eventually gunned down, with minimal injuries to the crew, it reaches a hand toward where Ava and Trinket are standing as it dies.

We find another room, it seems to be some engineering room, containing a working air purifier.

We shine our lights all around and Weylon says over comms that he can catch some faint glimpses of our flashlights. He then says that the egg in front of him is starting to move. We start running deeper into that floor.

Trinket says something really bad is coming toward us. There’s a hallway with 4 rooms ahead of us, 2 on each side. Maddox runs to the first one on the left, there are open eggs and a body. Kit checks the right room, there are closed eggs with no body.

Next two rooms, in the left one, we see an egg in the process of opening, and Weylon stuff to a wall nearby. Suddenly the egg opens fully, a facehugger emerges and jumps at Weylon, but Kit aims a burst of her rifle and blasts the thing mid-air before it can reach Weylon, who is faintly splashed by the acidic blood.

Maddox manages to free the top half of Weylon from the wall.

Kit checks the last room, has one closed egg.

Ava keeps watch on our rear, keeping an eye on the hallway we came from. Trinket says she’s real uneasy, a big feeling of dread, possibly a nearby xeno, we’re all on high alert.

Maddox finally frees Weylon from the wall.

Suddenly sprinting down the hallway toward us, running along a wall is a 9ft tall xeno coming right at us.

Dozer fires a burst , only achieves a glancing blow. The xeno first reaches Ava, he grabs her and takes a huge bite out of her face. Milky white fluid spews everywhere. Another furious firefight ensues, in which the xeno eventually dies with again, miraculously, minimal injuries to the crew, only Ava got really hurt in there.

Captain Gordi tells us we have 30mins max before the unknown ship gets here.

Kit and Finn begin blasting closed eggs, some are starting to open but they get shot before releasing what’s inside.

Dozer and Weylon begin to work to get some scrubbers. Weylon is understandably shaken so he’s not being very efficient.

We all run back to the Sherwood with some precious scrubbers in hand. Gordi says the ship hailed up, he tried to bluff but he doesn’t think they were fooled by that.

As we prepare to fly away, Dozer is installing the new air scrubbers on the Sherwood. Out of nowhere, a face hugger lunges at him but narrowly misses him. Weylon loses his shit and just starts screaming his mind out. Face hugger turns to Weylon and jumps at him, Dozer throws his knife at the creature impressively catching it mid-air and pinning it to the wall. The creature dies and melts some of the ship, including Dozer’s knife.

We pull away from the station and start heading out, the incoming ship is at least a military frigate based on the size of the blip we get. A small ship seems to detach from the bigger one.

Dozer launches a decoy as we fly away. The incoming frigate blows up the previous frigate’s wreck to go dock at the station.

Leaving the asteroid belt, we debate where to go next. Maybe Aberra-Wright2 fuel depot to resupply, though we’d need to be careful about the LaSalle presence there. Gordi asks if we should go out looking for the Cerberus, rumor is it’s waging a personal war against Weyland-Yutani Corp.

Ava says she’s locked out of her protocols. Maddox runs a diagnostic on her, he find some code that isnt annotated, which mean she might have done it herself. She deactivated her outside connection to prevent any unwanted changes or updates to her coding. Maddox patches up her face.

Ava says that these xeno creatures can slow down their metabolism to have an almost infinite lifespan.

We finally decide to head for New Galveston, where we’ll be looking for the Cerberus.

=== END OF TRANSMISSION ===

We’re at McLaren Station. Trinket was missing, so we had hailed her over the ship’s intercom to come over to the bridge, but she never showed up.

We all run back to the Sherwood to find Ava, she is in the cargo hold looking uncertain, she says there is something wrong. What’s obviously wrong is that all the crates that were in the cargo hold are now gone. She also says she hasn’t seen Trinket recently.

We split up, Red goes to search in the air ducts where Trinket had been hiding earlier. McWard and Weylon go have a look in the medbay, to make sure everything is in order. Finn stays on the bridge to monitor things from there.

//We all get stressed up a little bit//

Dozer checks the air scrubbers on the Sherwood, they’ve all been smashed up.

Maddox spots scrapes and drag marks on the cargo hold floor around where the crates were.

Red suddenly wonders where Hooper is, where he was during this whole thing. He is quickly found in his quarters, feet kicked up and drinking his liquor. Dozer shakes him up a little and Hooper eventually admits he’s the one who tossed the crates out in space and vented the ship to prevent us from travelling anywhere and possibly spreading the space beasts across worlds.

Hooper says he doesn’t know where Trinket is. He says the eggs were already hatched when he tossed those crates out, he says it’s Ava who opened them and let the beasts out. Ava says she saw Trinket on McLaren Station.

We propose to put Hooper into a cryobed so he can’t mess with us or the ship anymore, he whines a bit at the idea but Maddox eventually talks him into getting in a bed, and they make their way over there.

Captain Gordi and Finn remain on the bridge of the Sherwood to oversee everything.

Maddox thinks he hears some rattling in the air vents, in the duct works, sees some dim movements but can’t quite make out what it might be.

McWard and Red travel back to McLaren station to look for Trinket. Dozer and Maddox also go to the station, to look for scrubbers. Taking the elevator down to the 1st basement floor, we go toward a security quarters, there are bullet impacts everywhere. We can’t open the door so we go back upstairs to look at the dead body in the closet. As we go up, the lights flicker a bit in the lift and the cabin jolts a little. The dead guy in the closet has a jumpsuit, there’s the name Anderson on it. We find a card with 4369 on it.

We go back down, Weylon keeps an eye on his motion tracker, he gets a ping down on the 2nd basement. We try the code at the security quarters door but it doesn’t seem to work. We hear rattling upstairs and the elevator starts moving back to ground floor.

Maddox climbs a ladder in the elevator shaft until he can see in the cabin through the hole in the floor, he sees Ava along with a couple crates. She pushes a few buttons but they don’t seem to work. She notices Maddox. The lights flicker again.

Ava comes down with us, takes a crack at the security office door but also fails to open it.

We go to the other door on that level, going into crew quarters. It’s a hallway with a bunch of doors on each side, mostly sleeping quarters. Names on doors, right side, front to back. Snell, Wilmotte, Anderson, Ames, ‘no name’ (bathrooms).

Lots of blood and bullet holes/impacts everywhere. The only thing of note we find is in Anderson’s room, a paper that says the code has been changed, “add a 4”.

Rooms on the left side, back to front: hallway with more doors / Morgan / Ventor / Berne / Watson, but none of these rooms contain anything of note.

The hallway seems to be for the officer rooms, with doors alternating left and right down the hallway’s length

Woosock’s room (L): pristine, much nicer than the previously seen rooms.
Szostak’s room®: very nice room, lots of pictures, military people on them, loaded pulse rifle under bed, Red takes it.
Steven’s room (L): kind of messy, personal items, nothing of note.
Yamanaka’s room® : Japanese style art, sand garden
Nakamuna’s room: (L): Inside the room stands a Siegson Working Joe, some kind of android with a blue head. He’s in pristine condition and says he hasn’t seen Nakamura in 7 days, 6h and 3 minutes.

Last door at the end of the hallway leads to a cantina.

Back on the Sherwood, Finn notices one of the ceiling vents has become a gaping molten hole, with an acidic smell floating through the air. He and Captain Gordi hear something in the room, they are both on high alert.

From the shadows, something suddenly darts at Captain Gordi and jumps at him. Finn takes a shot with his gun but misses. Gordi manages to mostly block the beast’s jump with a coat but the thing lashes at him with his tail, leaving a bloody gash across the captain’s face.

Finn shoots at the creature again, this time hitting it and pushing it away from the Captain. The blood hisses and burns the control panel. The beast runs to a hiding spot, leaving behind a trail of blood that smokes and burns through the floor. Beast is crouched in the shadows behind a chair.

Finn shoots again but runs out of ammo. Gordi shoots and empties his gun as well, neither hitting the beast. The creature then runs and leaps back at Gordi but misses. Finn manages to catch the beast in a jacket and wraps it up but also gets all tangled up in the process. Gordi picks up his gun and reloads and blasts the creature with many gunshots, killing it, but spraying Finn’s arm with acidic blood in the process. The wound is so bad there’s an actual hole through his forearm and he can see the bone.

Everyone from the station rushes back to the ship as we hear all this going down on comms. McWard tries to patch up Finn’s arm but the wound is too severe for what a small medkit can achieve. He then treats Gordi’s face wound.

Weylon brings Finn to the Autodoc in the medbay but it’s too severe a wound to be treated short-term.

Weylon then examines the dead creature’s body and gleans these informations: it’s about a day old, its purpose is to impregnate or implant an embryo of an alien creature in a host. He also examines some black goo, it’s almost like a virus but with a different structure.

We go back to McLaren station to go try the code again for the door. No combination seems to work by ‘adding a 4 to it’. We give up and go to the canteen. There are 2 doors in the back, with bullet holes and impacts and blood everywhere. There are blood trails leading to the air vents. We find a lot of synthetic alcohol but also a bottle of real whisky.

The back corner door is where most of the fighting seemingly took place but bloody footprints are visible going to the center back door. Dozer opens that door, it leads to a bedroom with terrible body odor and explicit posters on the walls. It’s dimly let and the bed smells. There’s a smaller door on the side, Dozer kicks it open and a guy behind it starts screaming, he’s scared shitless. After calming him a bit, he tells us his name is Alex Dobzhansky and he’s some kind of janitor. He says he can get us in the security room. We drag him there, along the way we hear a rattling. He opens the door with the combo 98474.

Everything is made of glass, 3 offices are on the right side. Bullet marks and holes everywhere, acid marks, vent covers blasted out.

From the back corner there is a static voice. A terminal caked in blood, bullet holes in the monitor. It plays an audio file in loop:

“Dr. Nakamura,

Our team at Galveston Station reports that the Cerberus is active in their region. The board believes that the threat to operations at that station is high and have ordered that all assets be transferred to the Brazilian Facility. I know, before you say anything I argued your case but was overruled. Right now, the only thing that will prevent the board from following through with the transfer is if your research can produce another egg laying queen. Otherwise… “

Alex tells us that Sostak sometimes goes down to the bottom floor, the one we don’t have access to.
Alex recognizes the beasts from some sketches we show him. He says they lost powers and got out from where they were kept.

1st basement is the one with all the rooms and the cantina.

2nd basement is labs, kept clean, another lab with Nakamura’s personal office. We see a stasis pad with one of those creatures just like the one Finn and Gordi fought on the Sherwood.

3rd basement is tanks of stuff in the distance. Ava says she expected to meet someone in the lobby. We spot no movement on the motion tracker.

4th basement is engineering. There’s a latch with burnt acid opening. A room filled with electronics. Dozer doesn’t find any scrubbers but finds a lot of things we can use to repair the Sherwood if needed.

We go back to 3rd floor to look for scrubbers. We find a sanitation area. There’s a 3×12ft drum warm to the touch. It appears to be a back-up power supply and it’s warm because something somewhere is drawing a lot of power.

We find a large hatch sealed tight, with manual locks. Dozer opens the first lock with his ram, we hear a loud hiss coming from behind the door. He opens the second lock, something bangs into the door from the other side with a lot of force. The top of the door is bent so much we can’t latch the lock back. There is loud pounding on the door from the other side so we wisely leave that door alone.

We give Ava a comms unit (McWard’s) and tell her to go look for Trinket. She heads to the labs. Maddox stays with Red. They see some stasis pods with a few beasts in it. Plenty of cryobeds with people in them, none they recognize. There are 2 large secure doors in the back.

Peeking in through a window in the door, they see one room has a bed, blood on the floor and maybe a body inside.

Other room has a similar setup but is clean. Maddox and Red decide to investigate this one, but staying in the doorway. There are weird cylinders that run from the ceiling to the floor. Stuff used to monitor health like an autodoc, but better quality. Maddox walks in the room to take a closer look at the cylinders, Red covers him from the doorway with her pulse rifle.

Suddenly Red gets shoved hard in the back, stumbles inside the room, and the door is shut behind her. They see Ava standing outside the door with the janitor guy but she refers to him as Dr Ames, he’s wearing a lab coat, they start talking about the impregnation process.

Inside the room, the tubes start rotating and shit gets real. Red starts shooting at them. Bullets ricochet all around. Maddox tries to break and jam a tube but the other 2 are swinging open.

There are some egg-like things in there, Maddox shoots at one of them but mostly hits the outer husk, he notices it seem to be really resistant.

Red lands a solid hit on one of the eggs but gets sprayed by acid splashback on the left leg. Whatever was moving inside that egg has stopped moving. Tensions are rising, a creature slips out from one of the 2 other eggs and charges at Red but she manages to keep her cool.

The creature lunges at Red again and this time it shakes her, kinda panics and drops her pulse rifle. The second creature also runs toward Red and she starts shaking badly. She somehow manages to pick up her rifle and fires a burst at the nearest beast but fares poorly once more and starts screaming.

Maddox shoots at one of the two beasts, it gets blasted away cleanly and dies in a corner without either crew getting splashed by the burning blood.

The remaining beast lunges at Red, trying to wrap its long tail around Red’s neck, she barely fends off the creature latching to her face. The rifle is dropped again in the process. From outside the cell, Dr Ames can be heard “Just give in, you can’t win..”

Red tries to peel off the creature away from her face, barely keeps her wits together, but no progress is achieved.

With a final struggle, the creature manages to securely wrap over Red’s face and she immediately collapses on the ground, unconscious.

== END OF TRANSMISSION ==

The Sherwood’s crew debates whether to help the locals or leave them to their bug problems. Maddox reads to us some of the information he’s gleaned about Tweaker, Dreadlocks and Brother Daniel at the Marshall Office. The first two had sleep issues and night terrors, and meanwhile Brother Daniel turns out to be a sleep specialist.

Aboard the Prophet, we had found a bunch of files floating around, and reports of an incident involving the crew of a ship called the Nostromo and a creature who had attacked one of the crew. The Finn siblings recall that the Nostromo vanished about 50 years ago, after leaving the Solomons heading back toward Earth, but never made it. There is a substantial reward for finding the ship or what happened to it.

Captain Gordi tells us the story of a supposed survivor of the Nostromo, a lady named Ripley who says the ship was blown up. She was found in a cryobed floating in space, and apparently set the record for the longest cryo-sleep, 57 years.

We all go to bed, Trinket’s nightmares wake Red up, she chats with Trinket a bit, Trinket can’t go back to sleep. She describes/draws the black monsters of her nightmares.

In the morning, Landow wakes up first, he heads back down to crew quarters, he hears Trinket talking to someone, but when he gets there, he can’t see who the kid was talking with. Trinket says she was talking with her friend Ava. She apparently comes at night when everyone’s asleep and makes food in the galley. We all assume it’s somehow the ghost of Captain Gordi’s wife, even though she was called Lenore, but Trinket insists that Ava is real, very pretty, and that Captain Gordi has met her before.

Hooper, Dozer and Landow go outside the Sherwood to inspect and clean our ground transport. They kill a few remaining bugs and catch a live one, for our scientist Weylon to study. The bugs have killed and eaten a few more locals.

Weylon eventually discovers that the bugs regurgitate stomach acids which is flammable once in contact with oxygen, then they feed on the carbon from their burnt victims. The species is unlike anything else currently known, we decide to call them Pyroticks.

As it’s unclear who’s in charge of the town/outpost, Landow goes to visit the local Lasalle officer who oversees the iron ore mine – a fellow called Stanley Mellish. When Landow gets there, he hears a lot of cursing coming out of the office. It appears the planet’s connection to the outside world is not working – dense atmosphere and thick cloud cover interfere with comms. Mellish asks Landow for help, says bugs are coming out of the mine. Mellish seems to not give much of a fuck about the mine workers. Complains about some guy in the infirmary, says he fell from a platform about 2 weeks ago while his ship was docked and refueling. Ship is now gone and the wounded man was left behind.

The mine is out west of town past the bar. The foreman was killed a few days ago, and there were about 50 miners left before last night, no doubt that number is even smaller now.

Maddox and local marshall Haggart show up at the office, a bit of a verbal joust happens between Mellish and the 3 visitors. Apparently we have decided to help the locals, so we must ensure their safety for the upcoming night. Maddox asks Mellish to have lots of ships come over, but Mellish is less than keen to lend assistance. Maddox asks the secretary Cornish to bring in someone from the mining crew who has a clue about what’s going on. Eventually a lady by the name of Erica Rye shows up.

Last ship showing up here was named Archer, stopped to refuel, it was a cargo ship registered to the Weylan-Yutani Corp. Oddly, it took on even less fuel than it would need to burn to take off back to space.. The crew seemed very nervous. The arrival of that ship also seems to coincide with the first sightings of Pyroticks.

Crew goes to visit the injured guy at the infirmary, a certain William Hill. He’s got a busted head and all sorts of bandages. He says his captain had a contract with W-Y. Landow hurts the guy a little to get him to talk more. Says he’s from Chicago, born 6-14-2152, his ship captain is named Vera Gorski. Gorski brought a box off their ship and let a big bug out, which quickly burrowed into the ground.

Back at the Sherwood, we attempt to have all the locals come over for the night, since we have a cargo ship and no cargo to carry, we have a lot of empty space, but a few of them are reluctant to leave their homes behind. They are told to come to our ship no later than one hour before sundown. Marshall Haggart tells us that Stanley Mellish cannot be found, and that his personal ship is parked out west of town by the big satellite tower. Shortly after, we see his ship taking off and flying away.. Maddox sends a message to marshal services about Mellish escaping and running away from his duties.

On the Sherwood, roughneck Hooper listens to a space broadcast by a certain Robert Morse. He talks about Hadley’s Hope, the official claim is that the colony was destroyed in an industrial incident, but RM says he has documents that prove otherwise, and it’s all in his book Space Beast. He claims to be friends with Ripley. Apparently she and her crew found a derelict spaceship, and inside it found a space beast who attached itself to one of the crew’s face. Claims W-Y wanted the space beast to work for them. There was a Company stooge named Burke, eventually the beast was sent loose, and maybe 3 people escaped Hadley’s Hope before it was overrun. Ripley landed on the prison colony Fury 161, where a lot of shit also happened afterwards.

A few days go by before enough ships show up in orbit to take on locals. The pyroticks seem to have died en masse from starvation meanwhile since they had nothing to feed upon. Landow asks Captain Gordi about Ava, captain says he doesn’t know her, but Trinket had said he does.. Bill Hill is turned in to the marshal services.

We take off from Sullivan9, burning a lot of fuel in the process.

Captain Gordi gathers all the crew together. He’s holding a picture of his wife. He tells us they were in a bad financial situation before the pirate attack, and that if we want out, we can be dropped off at the nearest colony. He then goes on to tell us that he was approached by LaSalle, offered a lot of money and equipment – we had noticed the equipment on the ship was quite new and very pricy. He needed to rendezvous with a ship at New Galveston and pick up cargo, signed a contract and all. From the sounds of it, LaSalle is in possession of his wife’s body.

Captain thinks that LaSalle staged the attack on the Sherwood back then, that they know a lot more than they should and they even knew about his missing wife.

Captain admits he was the one who redirected the ship to New Galveston while everyone else was in cryo-sleep, but he insists he doesn’t know who might have taken the two pirates. Trinket says she never slept throughout the whole trip.

Captain says the mystery cargo is in the hold, concealed by smuggler’s compartments installed by Lasalle, and we have to fly it to the Arcadian asteroid belt.

We go investigate the cargo, they are crates that were hidden in a secret compartment.
Six crates 8ft tall, 3×3 base.
Five crates, 4ft tall, 2.5×2.5 base.
Two crates, 2ft tall, 1×1 base.

Red attempts to jimmy the electronic lock on one of the small crates but fails, but Weylon shows her how it’s done and pops it open. The inside of the crate is climate-controlled, and we find a multitude of vials and sample trays of biological material.

Red then opens one of the tall ones, it is an empty cryo-pod. Another tall one cracked open reveals a pretty lady standing there greeting us as if it was the most natural thing. She introduces herself as Ava-6. She says she is tasked with tending to all the cargo and ensure it arrives safely at its destination. She casually mentions that Trinket is a boon. That LaSalle Bio was looking for eight test subjects. Big crates #5 and #6 contain the missing pirates kept in stasis within crypods. They have large creatures latched on their faces. Weylon knows these things are somehow related to the space beasts mentioned in the Robert Morse broadcast. They implant an egg who eventually turns into an embryo and bursts out of the chest cavity. If the creature is forcefully removed, they kill the host with a mixture of toxic chemicals.

Ava-6 says the injured person in the cryopod could also be a possible test subject. The medium crates contain large eggs.

Crew deliberates about what to do with that kind of cargo, if we just should get rid of it because it’s major bad news. Captain says all he wants is to get his wife back.

We decide to fly to the rendezvous point, without going back to cryosleep since Ava-6 doesn’t seem to mind snatching people from the cryobeds. We then consume a lot more air, food and water than we should have.

Captain says there is a particular asteroid in the belt who has a stable fight throughout the area and that’s where we’re gonna be heading, there is a space station on it.

As we get nearer, we spy some debris floating around, signs of a fight. There is a frigate of some kind, military ship, no visible faction, but some of the corpses we see floating around have W-Y commando uniforms. The fight probably happened within the past week.

We dock with the station.

Captain harbors the hope that his wife is still alive after all.

There are klaxons blaring and red lights flashing in the station. Ava-6 begins offloading her cargo as if it was the most natural thing to do, all the while stating that this whole situation is very disconcerting, and somehow none of us intervene to stop her.

Captain Gordi, Maddox, Landow, Weylon and McWard are suiting up to go into the station.

We get to an airlock door, there’s a bunch of blood everywhere. Ava says her access code isn’t working. Weylon quickly overrides the lock. This opens into a large room. There is 1 set of doors to the left, 2 sets of doors to the right, and large doors giving access to an access lift on the far side of the room.

Ava casually mentions she will get more samples on New Galveston (the planet we were orbiting when we first got out of cryo sleep instead of being at the Solomons as expected.)

The left door reveals a security office with nothing of interest in it.

Back on the Sherwood, Red attempts to hack into the station’s security network to facilitate our movement around the base. Finn notices that the Sherwood is losing air rapidly. There appears to have been an airlock opened, he closes it, but we’re now critically low on air, we’ll need to find new scrubbers.

One of the right doors opens into a control center. Half-eaten sandwich, cold coffee, communications center.

The other door on the right is some kind of storage closet, there is a body in there, whoever it was killed themselves with their service pistol. McWard takes it.

Communications logs reveal there was a distress call sent out 6 days ago, nothing since.

We manage to get the lift moving up toward us. The doors part open, it’s a large service elevator that could easily hold several dozen people. There is a large hole about 4ft across that was blasted from beneath the floor into the lift cabin. There is a large spray of blood on the wall.

We peek down through the hole into the elevator shaft. Weylon uses his motion tracker and gets a blip. We drop a flare and briefly spot some movement far down. We shine our flashlights but then see nothing. The elevator can go to four lower floors with buttons and another special one the requires a card reader, but Weylon fails to override it.

We press the button to go to the first underground floor.

=END OF TRANSMISSION=

Documents Recovered (transmitted by Morse):

4/11/2021

Captain, Gordi Boudreaux
Roughneck, Hooper
German Shepard, Dixie

Crew:

Pilot/Comtech Spec, Leah ‘Red’ Finnigan
Pilot, James ‘Finn’ Finnigan
Engineer, Tucker ‘Dozer’ Dozavich
Scientist, Dr Sebastian Conrad Waylon
Medic, Chandler McWard
Marshall, Moral Maddox
Colonial Marine, Roger Landow
Kid, Trinket.

---

The Sherwood is docked at the Wright-Aberra 2 Refueling Station. Captain Gordi invites us all to share a dinner, with champagne and synthetic spaghetti meatballs. He tells us we can call him Gordi if he’s in a good mood. If he’s in a bad mood, it better be Captain Boudreaux.

We are told it will take about 2 months to get to the Solomons, and pirate activity is high in the area because precious metals are being hauled out in large quantities.

We will be travelling there with an empty cargo, which is kind of a waste, but we have no contracts heading that way. Gordi talks a bit with Red and Finn about navigation. The rest of the crew gets to know each other a bit. The Sherwood is an older, but well maintained ship, with a lot of shiny new parts, including the new Mother6000 System that will awaken us all from cryosleep in case of emergency.

After we’re all done eating and getting to know each other, we all go to cryosleep and set out to the Solomons.

We are awoken from cryosleep with red flashing lights. There is a distress signal from USCSS Coventry, G-Class ship belonging to Keland Mining Corp, less than 30mins away. There is another ship in the vicinity but it’s not broadcasting any ID that we can pick up. As we get nearer, we run through some light debris floating around, we determine that the Coventry’s engines must have been blown up. Maddox runs a scan of the unknown ship, something appears to be wrong.

We run through denser debris as we get close, we hear them clanging against our outer hull. A floating, frozen body bumps into our front windshield, the body has massive burns and someone spots a sidearm at its waist.

The unknown, smaller ship was attached to the Coventry by an umbilical tube but somehow got blown out. Mild radiation is detected coming from the Coventry, and apparently there is still pressure within the ship. We detect no thermal readings from the small ship, and some from the Coventry. We discover that the smaller ship is named the Prophet, but doesn’t appear to be a known pirate vessel.

We discover two more airlock available to board the Coventry, one beneath it and one on the opposite side of the Prophet. Maddox, Landow, Dozer and McWard are suiting up to board the Coventry. Maddox initially fails to get the airlock to open, but Dozer manages to force it open. There is pressure inside, and as soon as we get in, we hear a gunshot and some yelling. Maddox slips into the Coventry, heading left from the airlock.

We see a guy clutching at his chest and falling down on the ground. A quick assessment indicates he’s dead. We see an old, bald man with a young girl, he runs away dragging her, yelling “Protect the girl!”

McWard, after assessing the guy is indeed dead, picks up his jack to use as a weapon and runs to a nearby doorway, discovering the ship’s bridge. At the far end of the hallway, the young girl somehow frees herself from Baldy’s grip, slipping away, running to a ladder and quickly sliding out of sight to a lower floor, Baldy hot on her heels.

Dozer follows McWard to the bridge, noticing that there is blood on most of the control panels, and they’re nearly all fried.

In the hallway, a mix of firefight and close combat erupts between Landow, Maddox, and two other guys, a skinny one that looks like a tweaker, and a black man with dreadlocks. Moments later, McWard and Dozer join in the fray, and the two enemies are quickly overpowered into submission, with only Maddox suffering a superficial wound from a gunshot that just grazed him.

Down below, Baldy is still trailing the little girl and trying to convince her to come out to him.

Back on the Sherwood, Finn sends a call to the Marshall Services, who tell him to not touch anything aboard either ships and that they’ll send a team there eventually.

Back on the Coventry, Landow is creeping up in the cargo hold full of machinery, looking for Baldy. He eventually finds the older man near an airlock, holding onto an adult female who was halfway through putting up a pressure suit. Baldy has his hand on the button to vent the airlock. Baldy rambles incoherently about the girl and the Prophet’s coming, says the little girl is a Dreamer, and that he will be reborn. After his little speech, he slams his hand on the button, blasting the door open and hurtling himself and the woman to their death into space.

Landow then talks the young girl into coming out, telling her he’s a Colonial Marine and that she’s safe now. She eventually comes out of her hiding spot and says her name is Trinket.

A search of the Coventry reveals two crew members are still alive, but one of them passes away shortly afterward as they’re being brought to the Sherwood. McWard stabilizes the other one.

Landow and McWard then board the Prophet, looking for anything of value. McWard finds some food and water. Red puts on a suit and tags along. Landow goes to the bridge where a few dead people and some papers are floating around. Red discovers some electronic correspondence that says “We have located the Dreamer. Intercept the ship, Brother Daniel. Do not fail the Messiah.”

The Prophet, given its small size, likely flew from a nearby location.

Maddox sends comms to the Marshall Services, giving them a brief recap of what happened, and is told the Marshalls will be there in a week and a half. We investigate our prisoners for any information. Tweaker and Dreadlocks have barcodes indicating they used to be prisoners. Barcodes seem to be of UPP origin. We draw some blood and take their fingerprints. Both prisoners have a tattoo that is similar in shape to @.

We eventually recover the two bodies that were jettisoned from the Coventry, and Baldy also has the same @-shaped tattoo as the other two. Turns out Baldy is the one named Brother Daniel.

Red brings Trinket to get washed up and fed.

Captain Gordi says we need to gtfo, this place isn’t safe, so we all go back to our cryosleep, along with the wounded crew member and the two captive pirates.

We wake up from cryosleep expecting to have arrived at the Solomons. McWard does a quick checkup on everyone, and discovers that the two bandits are missing from their cryobeds. After everyone wakes up and starts investigating, it is determined that all the logs and data from the previous weeks has been completely erased, and Mother is of no help trying to discover what happened. A quick scan of all heat signatures onboard the ship reveals we are two short. Oxygen levels are also lower than what we would expect, so it is likely that the two pirates have someone been vented out of the ship.

We discover we are near planet LV 178, New Galveston. It is completely the wrong way from the direction we should have taken to head to the Solomons, from where we left the Coventry. LV178 is a mining colony that failed, there was some nuclear incident. Trimonite used to be harvested there. Maddox tells us the story about the place, there was a large ship orbiting the planet serving as support for the colony, and when the nuclear incident occurred, things just kept going from bad to worse and when a shuttle tried to connect with the larger ship, it caused the larger ship to lose its orbit and eventually blowing up and crashing on the planet.

Elsewhere on the Sherwood, McWard hears some faint crying, like someone is in pain. After a little bit of back and forth, he finds Trinket in the air ducts, holding up her head as if she had a headache. She says she sees monsters in her sleep. McWard gives her something to help her sleep and proceeds to run a basic health checkup on her. Even in her sleep, she seems agitated, and once blurts out “We’re all gonna die.” Results indicate she’s healthy overall, only malnourished.

The rest of the crew debates whether it’s worth going down to the surface of LV178 to try and salvage whatever could be valuable, but a planetary landing involves burning a lot of fuel to get back to space.

While we’re still debating, we pick up a ship on our radar. It is a military Conestaga-class ship, USS Cerberus, and it hails us, telling us to be ready to be boarded. McWard tells Trinket to go hide back in the airducts where he found her earlier. Cerberus asks us to power down our engines.

A squad of colonial marines boards us, and bring the entire Sherwood’s crew back onto the Cerberus. We are met by a Lt Parris and Captain Bracket. We briefly explain what happened earlier with the Coventry. They ask us if we’ve been down to the surface of LV178. Landow pretexts the need to go to the bathroom and covertly sends a message to someone. Maddox thinks something is off with this whole thing, the ship, the captain, but can’t quite tell what it might be.

We’re held for a few hours while they check out the Sherwood, and we’re then released. McWard ensures that Trinket hasn’t been discovered, and he finds her where he told her to hide. Captain Gordi says we don’t have enough fuel to reach the Solomons from where we are, so we need to head to Sullivan9 to refuel.

While chatting with Maddox, Trinket admits she was talking with the captain while everyone else was in cryosleep (suspicious!) She talked about all the ships she’s been on. Talks about the black monsters in her dreams but says she’s actually never seen one. Shows us a drawing of said monsters. She also says that Brother Daniel was looking specifically for her.

We spend two weeks flying to Sullivan9, not daring to use cryosleep again after the shenanigans from earlier. The station is on the planet’s surface, so we’ll need to expend a lot of fuel just taking off again, refueling fully will take a while, so we can spend some time exploring around. The atmosphere is thick and gloomy, windy, but Finn lands us like a boss, outside the station’s walls. They are made of corrugated aluminum, and there is no gate to close them completely.

Trinket decides to tag along with Red. A sign at the city gate says “No Booze Allowed.” Maddox notices that some of the ship upgrades are worth a lot more than what the captain says he received as settlement for the earlier incident where his ship was attacked and damaged.

Trinket and Red go to try and find some heavy machinery. The workers they encounter attempt to get the two girls to go drink at a bar just out of town. Red is acting kinda weird. Dozer and Finn eventually tag along, after Dozer determined that there weren’t really any side jobs he could have done to earn some bit of extra money while we’re here.

Maddox goes to visit the local Marshall office to browse through the data terminal.

Landow does some research on his own and discovers that there is no record of a Colonial Marines ship named Cerberus, and that Parris and Bracket were stationed together at Hadley’s Hope and were both believed to be dead.

McWard performs an inventory of the medbay to see what needs resupplied.

At the shady bar, Finn, Red, Dozer and Trinket are met by five old guys inside. An asian one slumped on a table, with a large coat on, one sitting at the bar, and three other old ones sitting at a table, eyeing the newcomers and whispering about them. The place is lit by a single gas lamp dangling from the ceiling.

Trinket doesn’t feel like going inside so she stays out. She notices a small creature looking like some horseshoe crab with centipede legs. The thing slowly scurries after Trinket, and she tries to shake it off by running slowly in circles, giggling in the process.

The bartender seems to wait to get approval from the 3 guys at the table before serving the crew. Dozer has a beer, Finn has a whisky, and Red gets a beer as well. Bartender asks how long they plan to be in the bar.

Outside, Trinket notices that there are now three such bugs around her. She turns around to go find Red, and she heads a buzzing sound. Looking back, she sees that these things have wings and are taking off after her. She runs in, closing the doors, and muffled thuds are heard as the creatures latch onto the outside of the door. Bartender says that these things come out at night, they bite and it burns like a ?$!&?$/!# and they lay eggs inside of you.%

After some back and forth between the crew and the other patrons, it is discovered that the Asian guy has a F’ING HUGE bug latched on his torso, and that he’s barely responsive, barely alive. A look outside through a window reveals there are now eight or nine of these creatures on the door, and the bartender says everyone will have to stay inside until sunrise the next morning.

Red tries to pry off the beast from the Asian fellow, but the thing hisses and the man begins to bleed a bit from the chest. Everyone in the bar is starting to freak out a little, except Trinket who distracts herself by coloring some stuff.

The bartender says these creatures only started showing up in the past couple weeks. Locals think they come from a nearby mine. There are tales of these creatures literally lighting people on fire.

The Asian guy suddenly sits upright, suddenly looking quite alert. His throat then expands, the neck splits open, and tons of tiny bugs spill out, the large bug unlatches himself, and his guts fall out of his body. He catches fire. Hearing all this shit going on over their comms channel, McWard is quite glad to be safely on the ship counting rubber glove boxes and cough drop packets.

The bartender ended up falling behind his bar, he’s covered with boils and burns and other unenjoyable stuff.

At the Marshal office, Maddox spirits the local marshal into action, grabbing a shotgun and getting ready to head out to the bar.

Back at the bar, Trinket has climbed on a table. The bugs seem adverse to light and try to avoid it. Behind the bar, the bartender has caught fire. The three old men are also standing on a table. Everyone is standing on a table because that’s the smart thing to do, given that the floor is covered in deadly bugs.

One of the old guys trips and begins falling, and in an attempt to keep his balance, grabs onto the nearest thing, which happens to be the gas light. The fixture is ripped from the ceiling, the guy falls on the ground and is quickly covered in bugs and catches fire. Gas begins to fill the room, pooling at the ceiling. Finn tries to throw a chair at the nearest window but fails to break it.

At the Marshal office, Maddox and the local marshal made a mad dash to the vehicle. Maddox notices the bugs fly pretty fast and well in a straight line but their turning abilities leave to be desired. He smashes a bug with his flashlight, they are covered by a pretty tough chitin and it requires several blows to destroy it.

At the bar, Trinket is surrounded by bugs, standing on her table. She uses a small laser pointer to try and chase them away but it’s not very effective, so she takes her lighter out. As the sparks fly, the entire ceiling erupts in flames when the gas lights up. The bugs scurry away from the light, but the flames themselves don’t seem to bother them much at all.

On the Sherwood, Captain Gordi turns on all the ship lights on and lowers the ship’s armored vehicle down to the ground and takes off toward the bar.

McWard is enjoying the safety of the Sherwood, counting rolls of gauze and bottles of eyedrops.

At the bar, Trinket attempts to jump from table to table, but the raging flames bring her attempt to a screeching halt, as she can’t bring herself to take a single leap, frozen in fear. Red eventually makes her way to her, grabbing her.

One of the bar patrons runs outside, but as soon as he exits the door, he’s smothered in bugs. The light coming from within immediately chases the bugs away, but not before the man has been reduced to a charred mass of burnt flesh.

Inside, Dozer grabs a table and flips it on its side, using it as a shovel to plow his way through the bugs on the floor. The crew makes their way outside the building, jumping into a nearby vehicle and speeding away from the bar. Eventually everyone meets up and they all make their way back to the safety of the ship, wisely deciding to leave the ship’s vehicle outside for the night, and promising to give it a thorough inspection in the morning to ensure no stowaway bug is gonna get aboard the Sherwood.

McWard finishes counting the Naproleve pills.

Documents found: